Introduction: Tips to Add a Washable “skeleton” to Stuffed Toys

By Aiguilles magiques
About: In the real life I'm a trainer for adults and a writer. But I'm also a knitter, I sew and I like to reuse things and materials to transform or to make other things with them. And, English is not my mother lang…

If you make fabrics, knitted or crocheted toys or other things, you may need stuff to help them to keep their shape or to be posable, and this must be washable.

What I use for my project. This stuff is very easy to find and free if you reuse what you have on your hand or very cheap. You will never waste again a packaging before thinking of what to do with it!

Step 1: The Stuff

Spinal column

To give a sort of spinal column to my toys, I use various stuff easy to find and very cheap, when not free.

1 — I find these brown sticks in some shoes, generally after an outdoor market, absolutely free, they remain on the street after the market, I clean them at home as I usually do, but they are net. It is the spinal column of my Sorcière du cabinet for example.

2 — drinking straw: they have a joint that can give movement to a toy, very easy and cheap to find. The straw are less strong that the “shoe sticks”. A straw helps the doll with the yellow sweater to stand.

Not on the main photo, you can also use these plastic sticks that come with balloons.

Clean-pipes: to verify if they rust or not, just let them a night in the water. If there is no rust, you can use them for washable toys (I washed my Ravatar without having any rust).

Bases

For the bases of some toys, when the designer calls for cardboard, I use instead:

3 — plastic packaging... as we can see on the photo or plastic place-mats (for the pin-keep Mouse for example)

4 — buttons: it is easy to find buttons large enough in the sewing box that we already have, and some can be hidden (because they are hideous) in a stuffed toy. A button is the base of my Yoda mouse.