More upcycled worry eaters!

After my last post about our summer time and short break because of summer trips finally something I have actually done! I have mentioned before how Finns tend to get crazy when it becomes summer and every town and village have their own summer events and fests. Our little village is no exception, our summer event lasted whole week with casual sport events, market etc. There were also small group of volunteers who opened a season shop for that week filled with local products. Potatoes and other farm products, crafts etc. I also made something, could have made more but the time was short with holiday trips and all other duties. I decided to make worry eaters and got together eight of them.

Four are the size I made the original one (here) and four are slightly smaller because the size of the clothes I upcycled for these. They are, of course, upcycled; zips, buttons and fabric comes from old clothes. For the filling I used new cotton wool. I didn't think it would be such a good idea to use old cotton wool from old pillows. Think about the sweat and grease the pillows might have absorbed! No washing can take it out of them, so new it was instead of upcycled.

I used knit fabrics to make them nicely soft and cuddly and of course saved the extra parts from the clothes I used.

This one was a small ballerina body and I cut the front part from the body's front part with the star, placing it on the side rather than in middle. Ears and eye background are from scrap fabric, the body itself is soft jersey.

My favourite worry eater! For this I used old adult pants made out of soft velour. There is still plenty of this fabric left for many other projects, the adult pants have so much fabric for upcycling purposes! Again, the rest is from my scrap box.

Green terry hoodie with bright pink zip and wristbands turned out to something more harmonic with green zip and yellow ears and eyes. Terry is elastic, very comfortable for a toy like this. Yellow fabric is out of old baby body.

Sometimes it is some small detail that makes you happy. In this case it is the zip. I had a sweatshirt blouse with grey sleeves (the fabric in ears) and I found a zip with matching colour from my storage! I like this one too because the fabric is sturdier than jersey and gives whole more feeling to a toy than jersey.

However, jersey works great for the smaller ones. For the the pink I used sleeveless summer top in size 104. From the shirts at this size you make easily the bigger one but then you need to have sleeves for the hands and ears. The blue one is t-shirt in size 104, also the missing long sleeves made it impossible to make the bigger one. Also the fabric is 100% viscose and very soft, I doubt it would have worked well with the big one.

For these I used old baby clothes, the left one is out of pants, the right one out of a body. Even the small baby clothes make great small worry eaters!

I have to say that if (or when) I will make more worry eaters for sale I will not make the fingers and toes! It would save me easily 15 min/worry eater - at least. I sold three of these in the season shop during that week, quite well when you think that these were the only things I had for sale, the shop was open only for a week and it was in a small village, not next to a busy shopping street in a city. Right after the week I sold two more so only three left!

I also made small notes with my email and blog addresses so someone interested could take a card and maybe contact me later.

I also had an explanation what these are, what they are made of and a mention that I can make something out of old favourite clothes, great keepsake! That's why I made these cards too, easy to grab into your wallet. The box is, of course, upcycled. I got a shower gel in a pretty box, this is the cover. It was quite pretty but the surface had suffered some damage in the bathroom so I covered the edges and the bottom:

It was just right for this use!

Altogether; 8 pieces of clothes used, same amount of zips and 16 buttons, not bad! If you took a look at my working room, you wouldn't notice it though, it is still too full!

And... if you want to make your own, I have a post about making your own worry eater with full tutorial: http://upcyclelina.blogspot.fi/2016/04/worry-eater-tutorial.html