From Plastic to Plush

Have you ever wanted to know how recycled plastic bottles are transformed into the soft, colorful felt used in The Toy Cove's plushies? Check out this video detailing the process at Foss Manufacturing:

Turning Bottles into Fabric

Removing Fuzzballs from Felt Toys

If you read this blog regularly, you know I love felt. Nearly all of The Toy Cove's plushies are made from this wonderful material. It's eco-friendly, colorful, and versitile, but it does have a downside. It accumulates pills faster than any other fabric, making a young stuffie look old and worn out before its time.

New plushie on the left, played-with plushie on the right

 BUT, even this has an upside. It's extremely easy to remove fuzzballs and make your plushie look brand new again. It only takes a pair of scissors and a few minutes.

1. Start with a fuzzed-up stuffed animal.

 

Felt toys gather fuzzballs easily.

2. Hold him/her up to a light background to see the pills more clearly...

and snip off the pills.

3. For fuzzballs that are very close to the plushie's body, lie them flat against the light background.

You can cut very close to the body without worry, as long as you don't tilt your scissors downward and into the body. Just keep your scissors level and cut away.

In just a few minutes, your toy will look brand spanking new again:

Before:

After:

New plushie on the left, new-looking plushie on the right.

And that's just one more reason I love working with felt. A pair of scissors, a few minutes' time, and you've got a completely refurbished plushie. You can repeat this process again and again and again. It's not so with furry plush animals, which either have their plush rubbed off or matted, and can't be fixed without a lot of effort*.

* (Of course, this doesn't really matter, and is nothing more than a cosmetic issue. As The Skin Horse said, "Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.")

The toys in this post can be found at The Toy Cove.

Eco Fi Rainbow Felt

I thought I'd take a post to tell you all a little bit more about my favorite fabric: Eco-Fi Felt.

When I first started The Toy Cove, I'd never used felt for anything more than a super simple, pre-packaged craft project. I had a general understanding that you could make it from scraps of fabric or dryer lint, and that it was easy to glue. Basically, I didn't take felt seriously. So I started out using the fabrics I had always used before; broadcloth, calico, or whatever was on the discount rack (isn't that how rag dolls came to be in the first place?)

However, one of the main goals of The Toy Cove was to use US-made materials, and I very quickly realized how difficult those were to come by, especially in fabrics. After some searching, I came across some felt by a company called Kunin that claimed it was made from recycled plastic bottles. That I could believe, but I knew already that most supposedly US-made items were "finished," in the States, but made elsewhere. A little digging, however, showed that their factory (not just corporate headquarters) is actually in New Hampshire.

Turning Eco-Fi felt into owls

It sounded perfect. I had virtually no experience turning felt into stuffed animals, but I had to give it a try.

Felt Frogs, Assemble!

The first thing I found out was that felt, compared to the more traditional dress-making type fabrics, is a whole different animal, and trying to treat it as something else won't work. There was a bit of a learning curve, I'll admit, but once I got the hang of it, I absolutely loved it. It's so versatile, so pliable, so... colorful! It was love.

Love!

Currently, all of my non-doll toys are made from felt, and all of that is eco-friendly, US-manufactured, Eco-Fi Rainbow Felt. Check out the Etsy shop to see some!