24 December 2011
Fleece, wire, seed beads, acrylic paint
Pattern modified from http://nuno-runo.blogspot.com/2008/...../mini-dog.html

I made a plush of my family's dog for my mom for Christmas. It didn't quite go as planned - the original pattern didn't have a tilted head like that XD Usually I test out patterns when I modify them so this won't happen, but this plush is so small that I had to hand sew it, so pattern testing would have taken a very long time. I was really worried my mom wouldn't like it, but she got really excited when she saw it, so I guess it turned out ok.

Plushie Ben is made of fleece, but he's not very good for petting because the speckles are all done in acrylic paint, so they feel a bit crusty. He's around 4" tall if I remember correctly. The spots on the plush only partially match the ones on the real dog - I was working quickly and from photos (Ben has separation anxiety, so he follows my mom around the house when she's home, so I couldn't have a live model and secrecy), and he's so tiny that exact spots would've been really annoying to make, but the general pattern is there, and some of the really noticeable spots are the same.

Ben's tongue sticks out one side of his mouth sometimes because he had one of his canine teeth pulled (he had a toothache before we got him), and my mom thinks it looks really cute, so I made the plush have a sticking out tongue too. The tongue also rather conveniently filled one of the gaps from where I sewed something wrong |'D

Paws told us that Ben is a hound mix. We suspect the other half might be spaniel because of his speckles.