I wanted to start getting into making stuffies. I have a lot of stuffed animals but I've never tried making one myself. I though I'd start with something easy, like a set of dice complete with D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, and D20! I found a tutorial online that said basically what I thought, which was, to make stuffed dice you just had to cut out the shape of the die side the number of side there are on said die. A D4 is a triangular pyramid with 4 triangular sides. A D6 is a cube with 6 square sides. A D8 is an octahedron with 8 triangular sides. A D10 is a
pentagonal trapezohedron (yeah really) with 10 lopsided diamond sides. A D12 is a dodecahedron with 12 pentagonal sides. A D20 is an icosahedron with 20 triangular sides.
I made a pattern starting with the size of the numbers I wanted to use, finding a picture of some simple block numbers I thought would be easy to cut out 500 of later. I made both big numbers for the single digit dice and small numbers for the dice going into double digits. Then I used these to size the shapes for the sides again finding templates (shapes) online. My patterns can be seen here.
Now I needed to find cool fabric to make my dice out of and some plain fabric to make my numbers out of. I went rooting through my fabric box and found some cool ones, a maroon and a blue cotton, a dark blue and a light purple satin, and I also chose a fabric I had a lot of to make a test die of each type out of, a black swede. I cut out each side individually pinning the patten onto the fabric each time and removing the layers when they became too thick (it was quite a lot of sides).
Next I began pinning and sewing the sides together in the fashion of these paper dice (
Dice Template). I started by just doing one of each die in my test fabric, the black swede.
Next I went to the fabric store for 'Pellon Wonder Under' which is a magical tool you can iron onto a fabric of your choosing, cut out the shape you want, peel off the backing, and iron onto whatever you want! I added up all the numbers of all the dice I was doing and calculated how much space they would take up and figured that I would need like 8 yards of this stuff, but this was assuming I spaced them out to take up as much space as the largest number. I ended up finding this 'Heat-n-bond' stuff that is exactly the same, but cost like $2 less at the store, and decided to only get 5 yards knowing I would draw my numbers as close together as possible. I drew all the numbers on the paper side starting with the ones so they could lay flat against the sides and stack closely together. I would scroll the paper up as I went along to make it easier to handle. I had already figured out how many of each number I needed and wrote that number on my pattern. I kept track of how many I had already drawn by giving it a number designation in the corner. I cut the Heat-n-bond as long as I could fit on my piece of fabric and then ironed these big strips onto my white fabric.
Now I began cutting these numbers out. This mostly took time, a lot of patience, and a tiny pair of scissors. I cut out over 400 numbers with 250 of them being the small numbers. You may notice that they are all backwards (you may also notice the big sevens aren't, I had to redo them) The reason being that to apply them to my dice I will peel off the paper side you're seeing and place that side onto my dice sides. I placed the numbers as seen in my dice template, checking and double checking that I had one of each number and that they were all there. I carefully centered each number, taking into account the seems I would be sewing on all sides. Then I ironed on each number individually moving along slowly and making sure I gave each number enough time to fully stick. It was very easy to do with the black swede fabric as it was dark and the white fabric for the numbers was thin so the numbers would get darker when they were fully set.
Being the first time I've used this stuff, and because it does, in fact, say 'iron on and then sew' I didn't know how well they would stay on but I didn't want to sew all of them if I didn't have to. These being my test runs I tried many different stitch patterns around all the edges of the numbers. I chose to do it in black thread cause I was hoping to add some interesting detail but most of the stitching looks sloppy and better off hidden in my opinion. I then sewed these together into their shapes, the D4 and D6 being the easiest to logically figure out I started there bring sides closest together, pinning and sewing each one at a time, keeping all the numbers on the inside of course.
Don't forget to leave a small opening in your last side so you can turn it inside out as I've done here though I would recommend leaving them tuned in for washing (as I did).
After washing them (because the black fabric stunk something awful) I turned each inside out and began stuffing them. The bag of stuffing came with a stick that looks identical to a chopstick but there was only one of them. I used to to make my corners nice and pointy and I tried to use it to shove stuffing into the corners once the dice were mostly stuffed. The small ones turned out quite well but the bigger ones seem more beach ball, they are all roll-able, useable, plushy, dice though!
