Goblin King Lovie

I've been working on some new ideas for lovies for awhile.  I think I finally finished one, a Jareth or Goblin King lovie.  (I go on to talk about making the lovie, please scroll down to see the images if you would like to skip.)  For the past couples of months I've been trying to figure out the best way to make his face.  I have a sewing machine that I can embroider with so I thought that would be best to make his face.  I designed his face is Adobe Illustrator.  Next I tried  software that was supposed to make digitizing an image for embroidery easy and it was the cheapest program I could find.  After toying with it and getting frustrated  I made an okay embroidered face.

The next step was to figure out the fabric pieces for the head.  A problem I ran into was that the face would get distorted when I stuffed the head.  So I had to fight with my embroidery software to adjust the face and add another piece to the head.  I have a bunch of rejected Jareth heads in my sewing room.  Last month I saw the embroidery software I really wanted, but was too expensive to buy, on sale in a Quality Sewing catalog.  The price couldn't be beat so I bought the Premier+  Ultra software.  It was hard at first to use with me not being familiar with it.  The guide was a little helpful but not much.  I was also disappointed that I could hardly find any tutorials for it online.

I found one helpful video and I was able to make a much cleaner and better stitched face.  The only thing I wasn't happy with was the mouth.  I tried to have lips but decided in the end that just a line for the mouth would look best for now.

I already knew how I wanted to make his hair.  I took three different colors of yarn and used my sewing machine to sew strands of them together.  Then I hand sewed the groups of strands onto the head.

For the blanket part of the lovie I found an awesome white owl on black forest background fabric for the inside and a spiral black fabric for the outside.  I thought an embroidered quote inside the folds of the blanket would look great.  "You remind me of the babe" was my first choice but I went with "Babe with the power."  I used black satin blanket binding to finish off the edges.  I made a black collar for the top to go behind the head.

Here is the finished product

It's not perfect but I think it turned out well.  I think the mouth needs a little adjusting.  I used a technique to make the face a little more 3d and it created some wrinkles in the fabric.  I think using a different fabric and/or doing the technique a little differently will help.   I could also switch to painting the face, my hope with embroidering was that it would be faster and easier to make multiples.  With everything I make I also try to make sure that it is machine washable.

Something people will notice is that the eyes have different colored irises.  I realized while looking at screenshots from The Labyrinth and of David Bowie that his eyes looked like one was blue and one was brown.  Here is the story of what happened to his eye.  I never noticed until I started this project.