Sir Charles The Creeper

So there's a wedding on the horizon.

It's 6 weeks away and you get the bright idea to make a soft toy for the wedding present that consists of 1,236 one inch squares.

Are you mad?

Well yes we obviously are; isn't he cute.

Sir Charles The Creeper - Completed

So how do you go about making this?

Stuff

Go here and buy the pattern.
http://www.arixystix.com/blog/2011/05/28/minecraft-creeper-plush/

Then get yourself a partner who is as silly as you and willing to spend hours making a toy (she did all the sewing here, and there is a lot of sewing) and who can provide input and ideas to help solve problems along the way.

If you can't find any friends that don't mind being clubbed over the head, chained to a table and and whipped until they assist you then try asking nicely and you might get a Pete, as we did.

You'll also need some aluminium wire.

Some suitable shades of material and cutting tools.

And a fair amount of patience.

The Process

You cut the strips as in the above picture and then cut those strips into squares, as can be seen in the little box.

Once you've done about 200 or so squares of each of the 6 colours of satin. You then get busy pinning them back together in the right combinations.

And sew.

This is the rinse and repeat bit of the project. You will be pinning and sewing for hours. Get a good lineup of movies together and get ready for some cosy evenings.

Look it's almost a leg.

Just a bit more.

And eventually you will have a leg.

This will have taken an incredible amount of time and you'll be thinking at this point is it really going to take this long. The answer is Yes it will. Best get more movies lined up.

Only three more of those to go then...

Time passes. A shrill wind whistles through the eaves. 
You are pinning small satin squares sat at a kitchen table. 
A small helper called Pete assists you.
>

Suddenly, as if by magic, you get to do something else.

Plier time

For the next part we produce a wire frame to support the legs and cut some foam to fill the legs out with.

The result looks something like this.

This then rapidly becomes a complete part.

You then go back to hours of pinning and sewing, more foam cutting.

After a few more evenings of labour you will have all of your major bits together and if you carefully balance them you can fool people into thinking it's finished.

There's still quite a bit to go though. More films required.

We need to fit the neck joint into the base of the head and then sew the body to the base and the head to the bottom panel of the head.

Charles needs somewhere to live and to be stored when he's being moved.

Something like this should do.

I grabbed a copy of the door texture from the minecraft jar, edited it a little to account for the fact my door opens in the middle and printed it out onto a piece of A4. It wasn't my intention to copy it but to use as something to get an impression from. I didn't want reproduction accuracy as much as getting the right feeling.

I removed any labels from the box trying to do as little damage to the surface as possible. I covered the entire box in masking tape to give it a consistent surface finish. After that it was a case of cutting out the windows.

From that point on it was a case of mixing colours, plastering it with lashings of paint and then painstakingly covering the front with squares of brown shades in a fairly random manner.

It's quite hard to avoid falling into patterns.

The inside was coated with black and then highlighted with a purple glitter paint to give an effect much like obsidian.

With the final squares in place on the doors it looks like this.

And the obsidian inside

All that's left to do really is put some kind of catch on the front to keep the doors closed.

We also made some little papercraft creepers that we were going to take to the wedding and leave dotted around the place for people to find.

We promptly forgot to take them with us.