I officially finished designing a version of Will that I’m happy with! It took three and a half plushies to get to this point, but I can finally say I’m satisfied with the design. I’ll walk you through my design journey in this post.

As I discussed in my previous post, I started out with a bit of an unconventional design. I worked the head sideways as a sort of football shape, with colour changes to make the face markings.

One detail that I really wasn’t happy with was the back of the head’s colour changes, which as you can see here were pretty janky. I didn’t plan my colour changes, and it really shows.

I really didn’t like how the colour changes looked, and it overall wasn’t giving the vibes I wanted. So I unpicked the sewing around the neck and beheaded Will. I worked up a new head, and that’s the one I wrote about in my last post. Here’s what that one looks like again, for reference.

It’s a very cute plushie, but to me it reads less as a wolf and more as a fox or puppy.

So I started again.

I didn’t want to take the plushie apart again, because this one is actually really cute, just not the look I want for Will. That meant I had to come up with a pattern for the body, legs, and tail again, because I did the first one freeform with no notes.

I changed the design for the face this time, where instead of doing colour changes, I worked a separate mask piece and sewed it on. This was definitely moving in a direction I was more happy with, but it still wasn’t quite there. I missed the dark aqua on the top of the snout, which I left out this time. One big change for this version, however, was that I tried giving it a bit more fluff by brushing it out with a wire cat brush. It certainly added personality!

The body pattern wasn’t quite perfect on this one, but I actually wrote it down, so I was able to use it as a reference for the next version and just tweak the things that I needed to make it work better.

I went out and bought nice yarn to use, partly because I had used up my stash of mint and partly because I wanted the colours to match my branding more closely. So for the final plushie, I replaced the mint with a soft grey, and for the aqua I found a slightly brighter tone that I like more.

The other major change for the final plushie was that I switched how I approached the face details. Instead of green safety eyes, I decided to use plain black ones and embroider the irises on, as well as embroidering on the nose so I could get real detail.

I’m honestly incredibly proud of this plushie. It feels very finished, and captures exactly the look I wanted Will to have. The best part is that I wrote everything down, so a written version of the pattern will be in the works soon!