The Evolution of a Panda Pattern

For the last year or so I've been teaching sewing at my local recreation center, a few kids classes and a few adult classes.  Over that time I've created a number of little patterns for use during class.  A pot holder, a zipper pouch, tote bags, shoulder bags, owl pillows, circle skirts.  Most of these are based off of free tutorials on the web.  During one of my latest classes one of the kids said she wanted to make a stuffed panda.  I had a look on the web and couldn't find exactly what I wanted so I decided to create my own pattern.

To start with I searched the internet for a picture of a stuffed panda similar to what I was thinking of and from that sketched out all the different pieces I would need:  White Head, black shoulders and arms, white body, black legs and black ears and eyes.  Next step was to test this pattern, so I needed some fabric.  I went through my stash but the best I could find was some faux fur type fabric in black and white so I decided to use that...bad decision.  This stuff shed like crazy when it was cut and was a real pain to sew - definitely not something that beginner kids could tackle.  I also found that the pattern was just way too small.  I ended up hand sewing the entire thing as it just didn't work trying to get those tiny pieces under the machine.  I didn't bother finishing this guy off - he's basically tacked together and filled with offcut scraps, but still my daughters named him Fluffy and he's been sitting on her bed since I showed him to her.

OK #1 is a failure, lets move on to iteration #2.

I went back and sized up all the pattern pieces.  I also made the ears proportionally larger and legs and arms longer.

For my second test I went back to stash to try and find some better fabrics.  I found a double faced black knit that would work nicely, but nothing in white so in the end I used some zebra stripe fleece.

This guy was quickly named Zeb-Zeb.  This time I actually went and added the whites to his eyes and a nose to try and make him look more finished.

But I still wasn't happy with the proportions.  His body is way too long and not wide enough so I went back to the drawing board again.

By this time I'd gotten to the fabric store and bought both black and white fleece and iteration #3 turned out much better.  Meet Chubby!

He's still not perfect.  I would like to go back and try one more time, but for now he's close enough.....and three Panda friends in the house is more than enough.

At this point I was pretty happy with the pattern but it was just a couple of pieces of scrap paper.

For quite some time now I've been playing with the idea of  learning how to draft patterns on the computer and I thought that this pattern might be a good place to start.

The first question was what program to use.  I wasn't ready to shell out big bucks for a program if I wasn't going to get anywhere so I started with programs where I could get free trials or were free,

The first program I tried was SmartDraw and I did quite well with the software and got the pattern drafted without too many issues, but when I went to print it I couldn't do it without all sorts of watermarks etc - I would need to buy the program to get it to work fully.

I next tried Valentina - but I found that it was a bit too pattern drafting focused and I wanted a bit more control.

I finally ended up at Inkscape.  This one took a bit more learning to figure out how to work it but after a couple of days I finally got it.  This time I drafted the pattern fully and even managed to get the final copy saved in PDF format.

For this project I made three separate drawings each the size of a single Letter sized page.  For my second trial I did try and make one big drawing and then split it up into pages later. I figured out how to do it but its a long convoluted process,  hopefully I can find an easier way to do it if I continue with this experiment.

But the good news is I have a finished pattern and yes my students were able to make their own Pandas out of it and were very pleased with their results so that's a definite win in anyones book.