Excalibur Plushies

They're done!

I've actually been working on these babies since last year.

They didn't take that long to make. I was just petrified of putting the girl's hair on. Once I got the girl's hair done, it was only a matter of making Captain Britain and being done with them.

A little recap here:



These plushes are based on my favorite comic from my youth, the English (then later Scottish) based X-men group Excalibur.

Of course the plushing started with the Bamf. The Bamf was made to look like the doll they had of Nightcrawler for several years now in the X-men comics.



From there I was inspired to make a Kitty Pryde; my absolute favorite ever.


Then the inspiration hit for the whole team:

Rachel:


Meggan:


and now finally Captain Britain:


They're all hand sewn felt, cut from a pattern I sketched on a manila folder.



Each time I started a new plush, I would pull out the manila Bamf pattern, and copy it onto some card stock. Since the body of all the plushes are the same "human" shape, it made individualizing them easy.



I would sketch on the newly traced pattern that character's neck line, any stripes or decorations they have; essentially, draw the character onto the "blank" Bamf body template.



Once everything was sketched out on the pattern, I would cut along the sketch lines and have the pattern pieces for the specific plush.



All that was left was to cut the right colored felt out, using the right pattern piece. Sadly, that was sometimes harder than it looked! Especially, when you get tired...

For the girl's hair, I used a suggestion by Tom Baily. Kitty's hair is made from thick brown, wool yarn that I bought specifically for her. I like the way the kink in it looks like the curly hair she used to sport back then. (I wonder how Kitty has the time to iron her curls out lately?). Meggan's hair was made of left over chenille that I used to crotchet a extremely long Griffindor scarf. Lastly, Rachell's little mullet braid was made from Red Heart yarn, that just might have been in my family for 20 years. It finally found a purpose.

For all the procrasticnation that went into these plushes, I'm really glad I finally wrapped them up. They look great displayed together, and for some strange reason, I just can't get enough of hugging Cap...



There are closeup photos of the individual team memembers at my flickr account.