Minecraft Soft Toys

My eight-year-old son is an avid fan of Minecraft. He plays Minecraft on the computer, he owns Minecraft Lego, he plays imaginative Minecraft games, he writes Minecraft stories, he reads Minecraft books, he talks about Minecraft to anyone who will listen. He loves to build, imagine and experiment. Minecraft just enables him to do these things in a virtual world. 

One day in the last school holidays he asked me to teach him how to sew. Together we decided to make a simple soft toy inspired by Minecraft. The character decided on was a Minecraft Enderman. This character is all black with purple eyes and long limbs. The blocky nature of Minecraft makes the characters easier to make as everything is constructed from simple square shapes.

The Minecraft Enderman was constructed using a series of fabric rectangles. I didn't measure anything, everything was just cut according to the size that my son thought was right. The eyes were joined together like a quilting block and attached into the rest of the head front. The head was then sewn together at the top and sides, turned the right way and stuffed firmly. The arms and legs were folded in half lengthways and sewn top and side. These were also turned the right way and stuffed. To put the Enderman together, the head was placed between the front and back of the body and stitched in place. the body side seams were then sewn with the arms in place. (This part was pretty tricky and I did it.) Finally the legs were inserted into the opening at the bottom of the body and sewn in place to the body front. The body was then stuffed and I hand stitched the opening closed. My son was very proud of his first sewing project and has enjoyed playing with his Enderman. 

After the great Enderman success, my son wanted to try another sewing project. This time, a Minecraft Ghast. The Ghast has a slightly more complex shape to sew in that it is more 3D. So we designed it to have a cube shaped head with legs that came out from the bottom. The face was joined together like a quilting block in rows. The seams of the head were then sewn, leaving the bottom open. The legs were folded in half lengthways and sewn down the side and across one end. They were then turned the right way and stuffed. Three legs were sewn into the middle of the head underside pieces. Three legs were then sewn onto each end of the head underside pieces. This underside peice was then inserted into the bottom of the head cube and stitched (with right sides together and all the legs inside), leaving a gap of about 5cm through which to turn the Ghast the right way. We then turned it right side out and stuffed it quite firmly to maintain the nice cube shape. I then hand-sewed the opening closed. My son loves this Ghast toy more than the others. It's just such a fun shape to lay on and throw around! 

The final Minecraft toy to be made was the Zombie. This soft toy required more use of colour to give an accurate representation. By this stage, my son's enthusiasm to do all the sewing was waning and I ended up sewing most of it. The Zombie was stitched together in exactly the same way as the Enderman. The only differences were the extra colours to attach to the arms, head, body and legs before sewing and stuffing them. The face was also a more complex design, but the overall effect isn't too bad. 

My son is happy both with his soft toys and with his first attempts to use the sewing machine. The toys all sleep in his bed and get thrown around in all manner of wild games. He's been mentioning making a Minecraft Evoker, but I have had enough of Minecraft sewing for a while, so we might put that off until some other time!