Plushie Pals (In-the-Hoop) | Machine Embroidery Designs | Urban Threads - Print

Plushie Pals (In-the-Hoop)

Plushies! Who doesn’t love plushies? Big plushies, little plushies. Little fuzzy ears and arms...

There’s never a bad reason to create a fuzzy friend, and creating professional-looking little plushie buddies is easier than ever, nearly all in-the-hoop! This tutorial will show you the simple techniques needed to make any of your Plushie Pal friends.

Supplies


So, I’ll give you the basic example of how to make this kitty, with a couple of tips for each individual plushie along the way. The supplies you need to make your plushie are:

  • Plushie Pals embroidery design(s)
  • Fuzzy fabric (OK, not required, but super cute for plushies!)
  • Soft or satin fabric for the insides of ears
  • Scissors
  • Tape
  • Tearaway stabilizer
  • Temporary spray adhesive
  • Light water-soluble stabilizer (if you need it for topping extra furry fabric)
  • Printed dieline templates for the body shapes
  • Needle and thread
  • Polyfill stuffing

Products Used


  • Plushie Pals - Kitty (Stuffed) (Sku: EMP16971-1)

Steps To Complete

The biggest difference between these stitch-and-turn stuffies and others is the little furry appendages. Often we’ve made extra appendages out of felt, but this time we thought it would look even cuter in fur like the rest of your plush. However, cutting out these tiny pieces of fabric and hoping you can get your machine to catch them without missing an edge sounds like a nightmare! Luckily, there’s an easier way to make these little furry pieces without messing with that kind of stuff.

Basically, we’re going to let the machine stitch out the ear/appendage shapes first, and cut them out later. That way you know your stitches will go where they need to go.

In order to do this, we’re going to hoop our ear fabric together as two big layers in the hoop. For example, for these kitty ears, hoop your furry fabric and your satin fabric facing right sides together. These two get hooped snugly together, no stabilizer required.

With your two ear layers hooped, the first thing your machine will stitch is your plushie's appendages, in this case, our kitty ears.

These stitched directly onto our fabric sandwich of satin and fur. When your machine is done stitching, you can unhoop everything.

Now you just cut them out! Cut along that outside dieline, and make sure especially to cut high enough to open up the bottom of your ears, like shown.

Turn your ears right side out. Shiny and cute and perfect! No messing around with cutting these shapes out first -- everything is done as one piece to ensure it goes nice and smoothly.

This technique does take more fabric, but trust us, it’s a lot easier than doing them one tiny piece at a time!

If you like, you can add a tiny bit of polyfill stuffing inside the appendages. We liked many of them better sans stuffing. Your call.

The rest of your plushie is made just the same way we usually make plushies. Use your dieline templates to cut out the fabric for the body of your plushie, both sides.

Start your next step by hooping up your tearaway stabilizer. The first thing that sews will be your dieline. Lightly spray the back of your body piece, and place it fur side up inside the dieline. To keep the fur from interfering with your stitches, we recommend placing a piece of light water-soluble stabilizer on top, with a few pieces of tape to keep it in place. Then, let your plushie's face and tummy stitch out. When that step is done, you can carefully remove the water-soluble topping.

Now it’s time to add those ears you stitched before! These ears were designed with lots of excess fabric at the bottom, so when you flip them in towards the center, you can leave a comfortable margin over your seam line to make sure they get stitched in place.