“Plushies,” “Softies,” and “Stuffed Animals”

When in the company of various friends, I sometimes pick up on slight nuances in the way individuals might refer to the same things in different ways. I love the variations in speech due to upbringing, geography, and so on, often wishing that I had more exotic or esoteric words to twist around my tongue, almost as if talking in a secret language. My theory is that this could be why foreign accents are so appealing in general. It’s always striking to hear others call a soda “pop”, a “soft-drink,” and generally anything other than… Soda. That’s all I’ve been raised to call it, and that’s all I will probably ever see it as.

Since I’m pretty much obsessed with crochet and knitting, with small animals being my project of choice, everyone I talk to knows about my love for stuffed animals. This is what I call them. However, within the crafting community, they are more commonly referred to as “softies,” although this term can sometimes be reserved for cloth-made toys only. I hadn’t considered any other alternatives in which to categorize my work, until I made a gift for a gamer, who reminded me that within that particular demographic, they may call them “plushies.”  Laughably, this isn’t even considered to be a proper word to my spell-check program!

This friend happens to have quite an impressive collection of commercially purchased plushies, so I wanted to make something different, that wouldn’t be at the dealer’s room of any old anime convention. Knowing him to be a fan of the game Katamari Damacy, I jumped at the idea of making the Prince after finding a pattern on Etsy.com.

A good idea, right? No muss, no fuss, just follow the instructions and you’ll have an instant plushie. …Wrong. Maybe I just can’t follow written patterns anymore, or maybe I’m just too much of a perfectionist to allow certain details to go unnoticed. It just killed me how inaccurate it was in certain aspects! Either way, after having paid for the pattern and trying my hardest to make it work, I ended up winging it. I simply decided I didn’t like the length of the head, size of the face, rough decreases and size of the body, not to mention some of the color details and lack of feet.  Too bad I didn’t think about how these inaccuracies would drive me crazy before I forked over the money. Small as it may seem, I’m somewhat up the river now as far as funds for crafting go, and I’ve been working my butt off to make ends meet.  That’s why my posts haven’t been quite so regular or length as of late.  My apologies!

Anyway, despite nearly loosing my mind after recreating the entire pattern from scratch, this plushie was met with great appreciation.  Call it what you may, but hopefully it will be more meaningful than the mass-produced neighbors it is probably sharing shelf space with now.