The Enormous Pikachu

When I take the girls to the shops, I'm always very focused about what we are doing and were we are going. There are no side adventures into shops for anyone to admire or covet anything they didn't already come to the shops to get. Probably because I dislike shopping in general, am task oriented by nature and have no desire for more stuff that the children will no doubt be tempted by. 

Steve, however, is more free reigned than I, and a few months ago happened to be at Garden City and let the girls look into a pop culture/gaming shop that was full of Pokémon related items. Not the least of these, were the stuffed toys. Rachel happened to see a giant Pikachu on display for the price of $70 and declared that she wanted to buy it. 

While I'm all for letting kids make their own choices and learn from the consequences of their actions, also I'm not keen on watching $70 of hard earned pocket money go to waste on an enormous Pikachu with no real purpose or playing-longevity. That's a no from me. It was a no from Steve in the store (thankfully!), but they came home and talked about it. Rachel kept bringing it up for a few weeks after, continually stating that she really wanted to use her pocket money to buy the Pikachu. 

I was still a hard no, when Steve mentioned that she could probably make it for cheaper. Rachel liked this idea, and we did happen to be in Spotlight later that week and had a look at fabric options. I did some rough calculations in my head and it turned out she could potentially make the Pikachu for around $20 - $30. 

We talked more at home about it for the next few weeks, making sure Rachel did want to spend the money and was going to be committed to actually sewing the Pikachu. My parents had spontaneously bought the girls a kids beginner sewing machine last year and Rachel had really taken to it (she's even sewn a dress, but I've been slack in blogging about it). Anyway, she seemed very committed, so back to Spotlight we went in the December sales to get the fabric. 

For the pattern, we sized up the pattern we used for Rachel Bunny, which seems to be unavailable on the internet any more (sad day!). Luckily I had saved all the pieces for the pattern and I could figure out how to put it together without too much trouble. So we sized it up, rolled out a large amount of paper and traced out an Enormous Pikachu pattern. 

Laying out the pieces on the fabric, I cut the ones that were doubled, but Rachel did all the single layer ones. There was only short bursts of focused Pikachu making that Rachel could take, so this was day one of what turned out to be a week of sewing. 

Rachel sat at the sewing machine and put everything through herself. I often helped guide or set up what she was going to do, but once I had explained it and gotten her started, I could also walk away, which is amazing to me. Never too far, but I could be in the kitchen while she sewed at the little table close by. Ears and tail went together first, Rachel suggested the batting in both of these to give them structure and stability and I had leftovers in my stash that worked perfectly. 

After that it was piecing the head together and adding the facial features. I did do the sewing of the face, because I used the appliqueing stitch that was lacking on the girls' beginner friendly machine. It was around this moment that as Pikachu took shape, Sophie suggested Rachel could finish making it and sell it for a profit, since the materials had only cost $20 at this point. 

We then had a long talk about how much our time is worth and how if we are making things to sell, we also need to include our time in how much what we are making cost. Good life lessons there. 

Pikachu is made of new yellow fleece and mostly new stuffing, but all the other parts are scrap fabric I had. The black is actually leftovers from my cape, while the brown stripes and red are just felt I had in the cupboard. Maybe the brown is leftover from Vulpix? The white in the eyes is scrap batting.  

Rachel managed to finish the Pikachu in a week, since it was school holidays and we had the time to be working on it most days. She found she didn't have enough stuffing to fill Pikachu, so she spent another $5 to get more, taking the total cost of materials to $25. Pretty good really. We also talked about alternatives for stuffing that wouldn't cost money, like the scraps from when we cut out the fabric, but there wasn't enough of that anyway, and Rachel had other sewing plans for those scraps already. 

The Enormous Pikachu is absolutely hilarious. More so because Rachel likes to take it everywhere in the house. He's so big that the girls can both use him as a pillow. 

Here he is reading with Moo-moo and Rachel. 

Not to be left out, Sophie also decided to sew a soft toy, though thankfully not on the same scale as the Enormous Pikachu. Come back in the future for an update of more child sewing adventures.