meet me at midnight

the goal here was: heavy, huggable, and more fun to look at than the official one, which i am not a fan of personally. SO the first step was patterning. with patterns i usually start with doodling and cutting paper via eyeballing to play with shapes and figure out the ballpark of what it should look like.

the pattern/fabric prep

so on the left side here we have my first attempt at the body, which was done with rulers and pencils and a protractor. the right is the second attempt. i deconstructed the first pass and recreated the shapes i'd made in adobe illustrator, and then tweaked them a bit. i rounded out his body a bit, and added darts in the top of the carapace to give it some curve.

the legs i went straight to illustrator cause drafting those manually wouldve been a pain lol. i trimmed some part of #2, adjusted the pattern some more, and then reprinted fresh pieces.

then came the glorious process of......cutting out 50 leg pieces lmaooooo

the only place that sells fabric near me is walmart and all they had were these basic poly/cotton blends with zero texture which is unfortunate BUT i did some research and found a cool technique for making a "permanent wrinkle" effect.

first you soak all the pieces in water, scrunch them all up and rubber band them super tight, and then let them dry. i had mine in the sun for 2 days before they were completely dried.

then; iron the interfacing onto the pieces. don't use sweeping motions though cause you don't wanna smooth out the wrinkles too much. i did more of a press down, move the iron, press down again, etc. the end result is this!

the nice thing is that once the interfacing cools the wrinkles are pretty solid, so if you're pressing seams or anything you dont have to worry about accidentally smoothing it out again. i stitched together the first 4 leg panels into flat pieces to embroider cause some of the etchings/tattoos wrap around the leg full/partway. i left the angled parts at the bottom unsewn for the time being, because otherwise they'd curve and it'd be impossible to put in the hoop properly lol. save the fifth leg pieces for now, we'll come back to them later

embroidery

aaaand then i spent like 4 days gathering references and embroidering.

i laid them all out in illustrator and numbered his legs just to keep them straight, and drew the and thus began me watching/listening to Hours and Hours of interviews while i worked on it lol. most of it is outline stitches with a couple french knots here and there.

assembly pt 1 - legs

after All That, i sewed the legs shut! first the unsewn parts at the bottom, and then the long seam at the end of each. then the ends of the legs. they were too small to do on the machine so i hand sewed them on.

inside each leg is a little sack of rice that i sewed because i didn't want him to pop a seam and then have it be a rice explosion. honestly i eyeballed them based on the circumference of the finished legs, and then filled them using this ridiculous method cause the pouches are a bit small and unwieldy

but it worked! and any wayward rice just ended up inside the lid. then the process was: a little bit of polyfil at the bottom of the foot, insert rice bag, stuff area between bag and leg with more polyfil, and then fill to about halfway up the leg. then stitch straight across to close the pocket, and then fill the top part, and then stick a pin in it to close it for the time being. basically you want the rice bag to be floating in polyfil so it's weighted but also the outside is still soft. rinse and repeat for the 4 normal legs.

for his 5th oddball/split leg, i used the same pattern,but i "split" the leg pieces between 2 and 3 pieces. ideally i wouldve made the split go about halfway up but i overshot. so don't copy me entirely there. the top part you sew like the others, and then when you get to the halfway point, stop. then, sew them shut so the top "tube" becomes two parallel tubes". the smaller side i stitched straight across, the larger i cut the bottom pentagon to match the newly-created triangle, and then i hand sewed it on. same deal with the rice and polyfil as explained above, and ta da.... Legs

assembly pt 2 - the carapace

first, stitch the two parts of the "front" together, then all the side pieces together to make a tube. then, stitch and trim the corners of the darts of the top pentagon. position each leg in a sandwich between each side of the pentagon and its' matching side piece. here's a little guide to how i placed the legs around the carapace.

this part got weird as i added more legs cause they had to be like, bundled up inside the carapace the more i attached. but we got there in the end!!!!

the bottom is the worst part to attach, lol. i did 3 sides of the pentagon on the machine and it was a Struggle with 5 legs all shoved in there lol. but we got there! now turn him back right side out. he looks more like rocky now!

and now, we Stuff. we're gonna make two more rice bags for the carapace, square a little smaller than the size of the carapace. similar to the legs, stuff a nice layer of polyfil along the bottom/top, put the rice bag in, and then keep stuffing until you've got a little bit of space left, and stick the second rice bag in, and another layer of stuffing to top it off! then youll do a ladder stitch that is probably neater than mine to close up that last part of the bottom. and then you're done! your very own cuddly eridian.

i did some random accent embroidery here and there but that's up to you. i also haven't done the adrian stone yet because im looking for the perfect button, but that's relatively self explanatory to add later. there are plenty of things that could probably be improved upon here but he was fun to make and is very fun to have, which i guess is what matters in the end!

to finish up i will link my PHM google drive folder which has all the reference images i compiled for this project (and others!) as well as pdfs of the pattern sized for 8.5x11 printers. also my interview archive doc if you want something to watch/listen to while you work.