I made a lot of progress on making my displacer beast pattern (while I was procrastinating doing my real work).
The deal with this technique is you make a model of the stuffed animal (or other complicated 3d object) you want to sew, then you wrap the whole damn thing in 2 or 3 layers of masking tape, hugging as close to the model as possible. Then you plot out on the tape where you want your seams, mark the points that should match up when you’re sewing it and the direction the fur should be going (if you’re using fake fur), identify each piece of fabric you need to cut, and then finally, use an exacto knife to cut the masking tape off the model along the seam lines you marked.
The reason this is a useful pattern design technique is that when you do cut the tape along the seamlines, most of the time it’s not going to come off in a flat, 2D piece that you can just stick on a piece of paper and trace. Most of the masking tape pattern pieces I cut off of this round baby are going to have significant curves to them, which means that in order to get from 2d fabric to the 3d shape I want them to be, I’ll need to sew darts. This video by Brittany Zerkle, who runs a great plushie design blog/shop called BeeZee Art, is really good at explaining the general concept. If you don’t feel like watching it, these screenshots demonstrate the general concept. Here’s a masking tape piece Brittany made by wrapping a creepy rock with the tape a few times:
And here’s how she cut it to make it into a pattern:
When you cut lines into a thin curved object (like several layers of masking tape), you can make that curved object lie flat by cutting lines into the curved part - when it does lie flat, you’ll notice there’s wedge shaped negative spaces in the flattened piece where you cut that weren’t there when it was curved. Using that information, you can work backwards to take a 2d piece of fabric and make it so it has 3d curves. First, you trace the outline of your flattened pattern on your fabric - including your best approximation of where the outline would be if there weren’t any wedges, like this:
You’ll eventually cut along that border (or like adding 1/4 inch or whatever if your pattern doesn’t include a seam allowance), but before you do, you mark out those negative space wedge shapes on your fabric, but you don’t cut them out; instead, you fold your fabric in the dead center of each wedge so the lines you traced are directly on top of each other, and then you sew the folded fabric together along the lines. End result, your 2d fabric now has a 3d curve in it; if you sewed all the wedges in the above picture together like that, your end result would be something shaped exactly like the object you wrapped the masking tape around.
Anyway, my displacer cub has a lot of curves, and I just don’t have the skills to math out in my head where darts should go to make the shapes I want. Fortunately, I don’t technically have to: using my masking tape pieces from my model, I can figure out exactly where the darts should go.
Another complication here is that I’ll need to sew curved fabric to curved fabric to make this little guy, and trust me, it’s hard to figure out sometimes if you’ve got two curved pieces lined up together right. I marked a ton of reference lines on my model across the seams, and marked and numbered all of the 80! places on this pattern where three or more pieces of fabric will need to meet up, so I can line the pieces up easily when I’m actually using the pattern to sew the dang thing.
Aaaanyway, I hope this was interesting for anyone else who’s into figuring this stuff out, but what I mostly came here to say is when I finally finished marking everything out and took a step back to look at what I’d done, I had a profound realization of what it reminded me of:
