Finally getting involved in making things again

Those that know me will know I have been talking about making things and working with Wookie at his workshop for ages and failing to do so apart from the occational mini bits of sewing.  Well hopefully I'm changing that now. A few weeks ago he said would I help with a urgent order that Mandala Studios had recieved. I said yes and between a few of us we made a full mascot outfit in what was really a pretty short time scale.

The brief was to make as exact a copy of the customers graphic as possible.. you can see the graphic here on their website and indeed compare our costume with him at the same time as there is a photo of him in action!. We were very lucky really as he was shipped to them only a few days before the volcano errupted, had they wanted him a few days later they would have been out of luck.. The order was from Australia and no planes have taken off in the UK for several days now.

Here he is in full.

He is very much a multi media mouse, the main peices are foam of various types covered in either latex or fur and fabric.  I did all the fur and fabric, well apart from the fur on the head and it was both a challenge at times and great fun. I am very please with how he turned out and of course that is very much due to the others involved as my part had many bits but each of them fairly basic, the important parts are the things like the Head which i had very little involvement in.. Probably the bit that had me most worried was sourcing the gray T-shirt fabric for the collar !  Why is it so hard to just get the right shade of grey!

If you want to see the process in the form of many, many photos as we went along they are all on the Mandala Studios facebook page.

Mandala Studios are based just at the end of my road.. mostly cos I found the workshop for Mark and Andy originally :) They work on the principle of having a pool of people all with different specalist skills who can either work on individual projects or come together for something like this so that all areas are overed by the best person for that job. Working with Mandala has several advantages for me. The workshop is just up the road and I can work there in the evenings once the boys are in bed if I wish. They get orders from all sorts of places I don't have contacts with, there is the opertunity to work on multi-media projects like this which I couldn't do on my own and they are very happy for me to develop my own ranges of items and market them for me if I so wish. Plus Wookie and I have been friends for ages and know we can work together and brainstorm projects and any arguments are normal and not friendship breaking :)

This next week or so I am working on a couple coats and waistcoats will post some photos assuming they don't go horribly wrong.