Arthur joins the family

Anyone who follows me on Twitter will have realised I have a "thing" about squids. The giant and colossal kind.

Mr9 is a keen student of them also, and received a plushie colossal squid with matching mug for Christmas which Santa had got from Te Papa.

So when I was looking through the sewing blogs I follow and saw this, I knew what one of my holiday projects was going to be.

Thus Arthur the giant squid came to stay.  Named Arthur as the latin name for giant squids is Architeuthis (arch-ee-tooth-us).

Arthur is a comfy body pillow. I suggested a bean bag but both children agreed that he should be a pillow.  A time share arrangement is currently being initiated to prevent the fighting that began as soon as he was finished.

He has an inner pillow (a gut sac) to facilitate his cleaning. This did make the project slightly more tricky since I had to put a zip in his mouth part area rather than just sew up the stuffing inside him.  However, I have learnt from bitter experience that there will be the inevitable snot/vomit/food/other mess that will get on his outer skin so I'd like to be able to put most of him in the washing machine.


Arthur enjoys a swing. 

Arthur thinks he could come camping with us. Somehow I don't think so.

Should you wish to make a squid, there are good instructions here.  I made mine larger than this though.  I got most of the supplies from Geoffs Emporium, a surplus store and I thought I would record what I used in metric for the benefit of most of the world who uses this rather than imperial. (Don't get me started).

Arthur took about:
3m of fleece for the outer part ($7.00 per metre)
2m of the cotton fabric for the underside of the tentacles (think this was around $5 a metre)
2 squares of white felt, one of black felt for the eyes (.60cents)
and a HUGE amount of fibre fill for the stuffing... my mum had a whole lot of quilt wadding she wanted to get rid of so that went in. Plus half a bag that I had left.  Plus 1kg and a bit of some bags I got from Spotlight.