Grinch Skin Rug

Disclaimer

I am not a hunter, never have been. I don’t hurt animals. I think bears are beautiful amazing creatures and I am not in any way, shape, or form condoning actual bearskin rugs. I believe everyone should live their best life (including bears). Please don’t get mad about a satirical Xmas present I made. Life’s too short.

Introduction:

One of the biggest joys in my life is making people presents…that make me laugh. This Schadenfreude tends to manifest itself the most around Xmas. My Mother-in-law and Father- in-law tend to be the frequent targets and they seem to like it.

My Father-in-law is a classic Midwest outdoorsman with various hunting and outdoors paraphernalia throughout their house. I thought it'd be hilarious to make him a Grinch Skin Rug, to join the other various hunting trophies he has as home decor. Plus, who else has a Grinch Skin Rug?????

Supplies

1. Green Mongolian faux fur (I used roughly a 6’ x 6’ piece) I got mine here (I have no affiliation): https://www.fabricempire.com/mongolian-faux-fur-olive-green.aspx
2. Heavy-duty felt for the backing/base (I used about 6’ x 7’ of black)
3. Poly-fil stuffing (any brand works)
4. A few inches of pink-ish felt (or whatever fabric for the tongue)
5. Black hot glue (I'm told this is stronger than normal hotglue and it holds amazingly)

Tools

1. Hot glue gun
2. Fabric scissors (regular scissors work, but fabric scissors are way better)
3. Sharpie marker
4. At least 1 comb (seriously, this mattered)
5. Vacuum (trust me)
6. Tinkercad + 3D printer for the head + hands (Well you don't need Tinkercad because I'll give you the STLs at the end)

Optional but extremely helpful

1. a 13 year old daughter who is a mini-me and shares my sense of humor

Mostly because I think it’s funny, these are Fabric Empire Inc’s recommended uses for Mongolian Faux Fur Olive Green Fabric:

Author Note: Whoever is making upholstery, warm bedspreads, jackets or boots from this stuff… I want to meet you. You’re probably fun to hang out with.

Life pro tip: Marry a beautiful woman who, upon finding out you ordered $100 worth of fabric, asks you what it is and what it’s for, and finds “I’m making a Grinch-Skin Rug” a completely acceptable answer, asks no questions and never really brings it up again.

Step 1: Research, Activate!

I should start by saying I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a bear skin rug in person. I googled it and based most of my project off the attached picture (it’s clearly fake, don’t get mad).

I then researched The Grinch. I found the attached basic grinch model on Thingiverse : thingiverse.com/thing:6874254 Credit to Friedlander326. Creative Commons - Attribution - Share Alike license

Step 2: Tinkercad and 3D Printers Are a Maker's Best Friends

I was only planning to use the head I had downloaded from Thingiverse. I wanted the head to lay flat so I uploaded it into Tinkercad, rotated it to a decent angle, sliced off a little bit of the lower jaw and also the top of his head.

I fired up my K1 Max and a few days later had a reasonably amazing grinch head. I printed it in white PLA+ and decided to paint it, even though I was planning to cover everything (except the eyes and mouth) in fur.

You can skip most of this step since I'm giving you the STLs at the end. Or don't. Live your best life!

Step 3: The Joys of Grinch Fur

I'm attaching a picture of what 3 yards of Grinch fur looks like. Mjolnir for scale. I used 1 yard for another project, leaving 6ft by 6ft for this project.

I laid the 6' x 6' piece of grinch fur out on the floor UPSIDEDOWN. I then traced my 13 yr old daughter’s outline onto the fabric using a sharpie. I’m not gonna put pictures of that because there are weirdos on the internet. She’s 5’4” or so.

Artist representation attached:

Step 4: The Body

I googled “Grinch outline” for the basic shape. I don’t want to violate any copyright stuff by linking anything so I’ll just describe some observations:

1. The grinch has short legs, like ½ the size of human legs.
2. His booty is wider than his chest.
3. His arms and legs are skinnier than human proportions.
4. He’s sort of shaped like an upside down lightbulb or bowling pin.

To accommodate this, I marked on my traced-daughter-outline where her knees would be. I then made that the bottom of his bottom. I flared the bottom out (making it wider than the shoulders) and just freehand drew some sloping lines towards the shoulders with my trusty sharpie. I left my daughter's arm and leg dimensions intact, as when we “flared up” the body with Poly-fil, the arm and leg diameters shrunk.

When I was done outlining everything, both my daughter and I were pleasantly surprised by how “grinchy” it looked. We cut out the basic outline, leaving 3-4 inches of extra fabric around all sides, just to be safe. I had no idea how we were gonna make the head work so we didn’t trim anything above the arms yet. I wasn’t going to buy any more fur so we only had 1 shot at getting this right.

We put down our black heavy duty felt, flipped the grinch fur right-side-up and laid the head down for the first time. We liked what we saw, so we went back and trimmed the fur 1 inch from our outline.

I should mention, this fur gets everywhere. Attached is a picture of my sweatshirt AFTER I wiped myself off. Luckily, the vacuum works like a charm when cleaning up. The fur doesn’t taste bad if you accidentally get some in your mouth either.

Step 5: Is There Anything Hot Glue Can't Do???

We started by stretching the black base heavy duty felt taut and put some weights on each corner to hold it. We were constantly mindful of moving it and repeatedly smoothed it back out throughout the process.

My daughter combed all along the edges of the grinch fur, pulling the fur towards the center. We wanted to prevent stray fur from getting under and glued onto the base.

I started on the inner thighs and worked my way from his bottom to the bottom of his feet. I would run a 4-6 inch bead of hot glue along our outline markings then press it down onto the fur. I would then rub the top of the fur until it felt cool enough to do the next bit.

I’m attaching a picture for clarity.

One awesome tip to share is we had 2 combs and were constantly combing the black felt to remove stray grinch fur. I didn’t want anything to interfere with the seal. You can see how much grinch fur was flying everywhere in that last picture. I’ve blown 2 pieces of grinch fur off my laptop while typing this out and we finished the project 11 days ago and in a different room.

Step 6: Add Poly-fil

After we had the inner legs glued down, my daughter would stuff a loose amount of polyfill inside and pat it down to give it shape. Interestingly, the Poly-fil basically stuck to the back side of the grinch fur, and that part was far easier than anticipated.

We used about an inch or so along the whole interior, or putting it another way, we aimed to have the grinch “body” sit about an inch above the base felt. We tried to make it uniform but didn’t stress much as the 3 in fur hid any imperfections.

Just for clarity sake, I did my best to glue along the traced lines we had made. We had left 1" of overhang past the traced line, so we didn't stress about perfection.

She stuffed, I glued and pressed down until cool-ish. Rinse and repeat for hours. We worked inside to outside, bottom to top. We had great conversations and a lot of laughs along the way. It was a really fun time, even though the task itself became monotonous. 10/10 bonding activity. Would recommend.

We called it a night after getting to the head.

Step 7: Don't Forget the Hands!

Or should I say she went to bed, while I stayed up making grinch hands...

Tinkercad is absolutely awesome. I have zero training in CAD stuff and have managed to teach myself enough to do pretty much whatever my imagination can dream up. I have 150-ish creations in “Your Designs” on Tinkercad.

Tinkercad has some ready-made models, including a hand. The Tinkercad hand didn’t look grinchy enough, so I elongated the fingers to about twice the normal length. My 3d printer spit out 2 hands in no time. STLs below.

I cut strips that were slightly longer and wider than each finger and hot glued them on. I left the top of the hand bare so I could “connect”/glue the arm fabric there.

I trimmed the fur between adjoining fingers, as otherwise the fur sort of visually blended together into a big blob. I also combed the hand fur and that made it nice and silky smooth.

Step 8: Embrace the Power of Impending Deadlines!

The next day (Xmas Eve) we had until noon to finish as we would be leaving for Xmas with the inlaws then. We got to work right away after breakfast.

I cut a section of discarded fur into the shape of his snout, or from his cheeks, down to the upper lip of his mouth, to in between his eyes. See pic. I trimmed this down fairly short, as I picture the grinch’s fur being thinner around the mouth area. A Grinch has gotta eat!

We hotglued that on, starting from the middle outwards.

Step 9: Tick - Tock Gotta Finish the Face

We slowly removed excess material until we could mostly wrap his face. We made small vertical cuts in the fabric so it would lay nicely along the various angles.

I cut another piece for the lower jaw from the discarded fabric. Think “beard-shape”. Starting from the middle lower jaw, this piece extended back to the back of the head. Hotglued in place.

By this point, my wife was coming to “check if we were done” every 10 minutes or so (she knew we weren’t) as our noon deadline was approaching more quickly than we would have liked.

We continued to trim small bits off the remaining fabric until it draped over the head, almost like a hoodie hood. We then glued everything down

In retrospect, we were way more detailed and delicate than we needed to be. If there were any gaps, we could have easily glued a small slice of excess fur in place and it's shaggy enough that no one would be the wiser. I'm not saying proceed with reckless abandon, I'm just saying don't let fear of making a mistake hold you up too much.

Step 10: Final Touches

We glued a tongue on, because that’s how Looney Toons taught me things would look. My daughter made a pretty great tongue out of a strip of pink felt and a sharpie.

For our last step, we then cut the black base fabric 1 inch from the edge of the fur.

My daughter had the last minute idea to throw a Santa hat on him and it was absolutely a great addition.

Timecheck: 11:45am. Jumped in the shower and ran to the car. Right on time.

Life Pro Tip: Your wonderful wife will not care if you point out “there was nothing to worry about”. I have been married long enough to know these things.

Step 11: Give the Gift of Laughter

That friends is the face of a man who is happy I married his daughter. Nana is in the background snapping pics to text to all her friends.

My Mother-in-law and Father-in-law absolutely loved their gift and are still proudly displaying it in their home. I’m told it generates quite the laughter and conversation anytime they have guests.

Also their dog June loves it too.

The only thing I’m sad about is I don’t get to have it at my house, but I'm happy knowing we've put a lot of smiles on a lot of people’s faces with this guy. I’ll might do another one next year, after I forget what grinch fur tastes like.

https://youtube.com/shorts/7UgmvrFBbIc?feature=share

Thanks for checking this out. Good luck to everyone else in this contest!

STLs attached here.

Step 12: Safety Stuff

1. You can burn yourself with hotglue or a hotglue gun. No one thinks burns are cool or tough once they find out its from a hot glue gun.
2. Don't run with scissors or you mom will probably be mad at both of us. Eye-patches do look cool and tough and outlaw bikers would probably really like hearing about your scissor running injury.
3. A 13 yr old girl can be very mean and sarcastic. My daughter tried to hurt my feeling (yes singular) several times and repeatedly informed me that she was smarter than me. That may be true but I'm not admitting it to her.
4. Don't intentionally breath in or swallow grinch fur. It's probably bad for you.
5. If you're an adult and didn't know any of these things, probably take a CPR class and/or some basic first aid. I presume your local Emergency Room knows you on a first name basis.

Step 13: Reflection

A lot of times when I do projects, there is at least 1 major catastrophe, unexpected hiccup or the final product doesn't match up to my vision of what it should look like.

I was pleasantly surprised that everything went well during this build. My daughter and I had an incredible time making this thing. Is it perfect? No, never is. I’ve learned that I’m my own harshest critic and I'm pretty darn happy with how this came out.

My only regret is overthinking steps and getting hung up worrying and overplanning to avoid mistakes. Once we actually jumped in with both feet, things went great. Don't spend 5 hours worrying how to get the eyebrows right when you could take 5 minutes to do the eyebrows and 2 minutes to fix them if you don't do them perfect.