stuffed stuff: master chief June 25, 2009

EDIT: I just want to make something clear before it gets too crazy.

Unfortunately, the patterns and plush Master Chief are not for sale. =<

I work for a post-production company, and I’ve made prototypes of plush of anime characters to be mass-produced legally before, and I am so very aware of copyright law. Making profits from the products of copyrighted characters without any legal contract can cause a lot of trouble. I can’t give away the patterns either, since I cannot stop anyone else from making profits with them. Also I spent a very long time making the base body patterns, so I can’t sell them or give them away either.

You just have to be a very good friend of mine to adopt a plush Master Chief. 😀

For those who want a plush Master Chief sooooo bad… You can probably find similar base body patterns in a doll book or online. You just have to make the patterns for the costume (?) by looking at images or toys of Master Chief. Like I mentioned, it’s a tedious work, but not impossible to do. Good luck!!

I’m too tired to write anything clever to begin this post, so I’m just gonna say… Yay! I finished! (And this time, I took a LOT of pictures while making it.)

Master Chief from Halo
Created and stuffed: June 2009

(*The photos of “making of Master Chief” were taken by me. That’s why they are crappy. :P)

My friend Lupos is turning 29 on June 26th, but we decided to have his birthday party early on the 24th. Lupos also works in the online card game “Alteil” division at the company I work at. He’s a programmer/super tech-savvy/customer support/repairman, etc…Yep, he’s the guy every company wishes they had. He’s also, like many of my friends are, a gamer. Not just a gamer, but a hardcore gamer. Besides working for Alteil, he also writes articles and reviews for an online game news/review site, SPOnG. And like any boy gamer, when he grows up, he wants to be Master Chief.

Before anyone gets tired of reading, and scrolls down just to see pretty pictures, here’s a blog post by Lupos, the lucky guy who has adopted this snuggly Master Chief..

Master Chief is a fictional character and the main protagonist from the game Halo. Halo is a first-person shooter video game, based on the science fictional events and settings in the Halo Universe. (from wikipedia) Anyone who’s played the game will tell you that Master Chief is the man of awesomeness. Anyway, I searched online, and didn’t find the official Master Chief stuffed toy, so I decided to make him “the one and only” kind of plush. I’ve made Lupos’ girlfriend, Dana, (who also works at the same company) a plush toy of herself on her birthday before. I thought it’d be cute if I made Master Chief the same size as her plush, so they could play together.

"Maid Dana" I made everything from scratch except her shoes, and the weapons on her right hand.

I started the project Sunday afternoon. It was cloudy out, so I didn’t feel too guilty for staying home all day. 🙂 First, I used the same pattern as the Dana doll and made a black base body.

Cut out fabric, ready to be sewn. (oops I had my camera set to "tungsten")

And this is what it looks like after sewing the pieces together.

I don’t usually use the “gluing felt on the body” method when I make plush. Felt isn’t ideal for plush because the surface gets fuzzy, stretches (and doesn’t stretch back), and bulky. But since the costume for Master Chief is very complicated, I just decided to glue felt onto his body for this project.

I have tons of felt, but I didn’t have the color I wanted to use for the final product at the time, so I cut purple felt, pinned it to the body, trimmed it, and pinned it again… I just kept doing it to make cloth pattern for his costume. Using felt to make final patterns is much easier than putting paper on a 3D object to make final patterns.

This purple felt is going to be my pattern. I'll draw lines on it as I look at reference pictures.

Just keep adding pieces...

If I were good at “simplifying complicated stuff”, this could’ve been easier and the final product would’ve looked more polished… I ended up making pretty much all the costume pieces.

This process took… forever. I finished making the patterns for the body on Monday morning, but I still didn’t know exactly how to make the helmet. (I was saving the most difficult part until the very end. I’m smart like that. :P)

I got the right color of felt on Monday. Once I got home, I started cutting up the felt using the pattern, and pinned it to the body. Nothing complicated, just tedious work. By Tuesday morning, almost all the body pieces were pinned on. But I still hadn’t started making the helmet yet.

Chest plate layers

Tuesday night, I started gluing the pieces to the body. I didn’t want to just glue a round piece to bottom of the feet, so I actually sewed and made boots with felt. Then I finally started working on the helmet. I didn’t take pictures of the helmet in process because I spent hours just trimming felt for patterns, and it still didn’t look so good… But I only had several hours left. So I just went ahead and started making the helmet using the half-assed pattern. Somehow I finally finished it! I can’t remember much about how I made the helmet. Seems like I was sleep making. On a serious note. Do not sleep sew with a sewing machine! It’s very dangerous.

I actually had about an hour before I had to leave the house. I thought of making an Energy Sword, which is a weapon from Halo. But then I realized that I probably wasn’t thinking right, so I ignored that. 3 hours of sleep in 48 hours does NOT make you very productive. I always end up doing the same thing when I make plush as a gift for my friends, but as I get older, it gets harder for my body, eyes and brains to keep up.

But the very important thing was that just like the last plush, I managed to finish it! I don’t know but maybe making bento is actually improving my guesstimate on how long it’ll take to make things.

We went to Daisy May’s BBQ in the city (I’ll blog about this place later), and I gave it to Lupos at the dinner. He seemed to enjoy the plush Master Chief (or Plushter Chief?) a lot. Everyone was making the Master Chief pose. Unfortunately, Dana had already packed her Dana doll (our company is moving soon), so we couldn’t make them play with each other this time, but once we move to the new office, I’ll make sure to take pictures of them together. 🙂

I didn’t post all the pictures of Master Chief project on here, so if you want to see more pictures of him, please check them out on my flickr page.

Master Chief set on my flickr
Making of Master Chief set on my flickr

Collections of my stuffed stuff on my flickr