Bumper Pokemon! A jigglypuff tutorial!

 In the last post, I explained how to make jigglypuff ears.  This post will explain the rest!  The ultimate goal?  An army of these bumper pokemon!

These bumper balls are about 36" in diameter.  You will probably need around 2 yards of fabric to cover the ball. I bought a pink fleece for jigglypuff, which worked well!

Honestly, I ended up mostly free-handing the fabric application, trying to keep the seams to a minimum.  It resulted in some weirdly placed seams, to be honest, but I managed to keep the front of jigglypuff pretty seam-free.

Once I had the fabric draped, I glued the ears down.  I used hot glue to attach the ears AND the fabric, but BEWARE!  If you let the glue get to hot, it will POP the ball!  Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way.  Below are a series of photos showing the attachment process.

It popped!  Oh no!  We patched it with a UV activated epoxy, initially, but then we ran out and had to get creative.  Ultimately, the patch consisted of some epoxy, regular wood glue, saran wrap, and duct tape.

Ultimately, I would actually suggest cutting your fabric into 2 pieces and trying to center your seams around the arm holes.  In retrospect, that would have been my plan.

Once your fabric is on, you will want to create eyes, which I did with felt squares layered on top of each other.  Like so:

  I used the same technique with Jiggly's mouth, using a black piece of fabric as the base, a darker pink as the mouth, and a small light pink piece inside that.  Once you have the mouth done, it's time to make the hair.  I had an abandoned viking helmet project laying around, and used that as a base.  I then wrapped thin craft foam around each side, and cut the front to look like Jiggly's swirl.  You can see how the base looked below:

You can see the single eva foam strip across the top, which was attached to an eva foam band.

I then attached fabric to it and was left with having to cut out vision holes.  The first attempt was a total failure:

Total horror show

So I connected the two eye holes to make more of a vision bar, and then covered it with pink tulle.  I paired it with some pink clothing, and I was really excited by the end result!  Can't wait to show you all the rest of the bumper brigade!

Jigglypuff: Foam Animal Ear Tutorial

I will admit it: I am a huge pokemon lover.  When pokemon go came out, I was running around Nashville trying to catch em' all, and I even re-watched Indigo League (well, the portion that's on Netflix) so I could have a constant poke-fix.  Re-watching Indigo league reminded me of how much I love Jigglypuff, that sassy little pink blob with his marker of doom. 

I also really love Clefairy, because it is adorable, and for awhile I was thinking it would be really fun to get some moon shoes and bounce around as Clefairy.  So I went on Amazon and looked at moon shoes.  And while I was looking, I found these:

At that moment, I scrapped the Clefairy idea and decided to make Jigglypuff into a reality.

To begin, I decided to make Jiggly's ears.  It was incredibly simple, and all you need is a 2 1/2" thick piece of upholstery foam (approximately 1 1/2' x 2' - it just needs to be big enough to cut 2 10" equilateral triangles.); good scissors; a knife to cut through the foam; black fabric; pink fabric; and hot glue.

Step 1:

Trace two equilateral triangles onto the foam, making each side 10" (you could maybe go down to 9 if you want), and cut out the triangles using your knife.  You should get a piece that looks like this (although I'd already started carving this one):

Step 2:

Carve your triangle into an ear shape!  As you can see above, the outside of the ear should be slightly curved.  You will then want to hollow out the inner ear a bit, like so:

Make sure to leave a lip around the edge of the inside of the ear, as shown above.

Step 3:

Once you have the ear carved the way you want, fire up your glue gun and cut out your black fabric, which will be going on the inside of the ear.  I made sure to cut it slightly bigger than needed, just in case I messed up.  Once you have it cut, glue it down.  Super simple. 

Step 4:

The next step is to glue your pink fabric on.  This is ever so slightly more difficult, as you will have to make a small dart at the tip of the ear to keep the fabric from wrinkling.  You can see how it works here:

The end result?  Some fun Jigglypuff ears that will fit on a huge plastic Jigglypuff body!