Sloths from Funky Friends Factory & Island Batik

For April, Island Batik Ambassadors were challenged to sew a stuffed toy from the Funky Friends Factory.  Pauline, the brilliance behind the Funky Friends, has a ton of fun animals to choose from, and they all have alliterative names.  I chose Slowpoke the Sloth.

 

There are three people in my house and we all love stuffed animals, so I was pretty sure from the start that I would make three.  I used the Blender Bubbles in Sahara for the body of all three sloths and then each of chose our accent fabric for the face and claws. By using the same body fabric, I hoped they would look like a family.

Fire Monkey named his sloth Slowpoke, though he did not know that was the name of the pattern.  He liked Bubbles in Sprout.

Slowpoke

 

Husband likes ironic names so his sloth is Flash.  This is the only fabric not from the always-available Foundations collection; it is from Citified by Kathy Engle for Sherry Shish of Powered by Quilting, and is a beautiful sapphire blue.

Flash

 My sloth is Veronica, for t.v. character Veronica Mars, played by Kristin Bell who is well known to adore sloths.  I absolutely loved the foundation Garnet next to the Sahara Bubbles; both were in my most recent ambassador box and when I saw them together, I knew that would be the combo for my sloth.

Veronica

The products featured in this post were given to me by Island Batik, Funky Friends Factory, Schmetz, & Aurifil.

I love the size of these sloths, they are quite generous and very huggable.  They weren't easy, per say, but Pauline's instructions are very thorough.  There is also a blog post for each individual animal that show you pictures of the steps and I found the photos extremely helpful, though you do have to remember to still read the pattern, as I did find one or two steps that were important but not really visual, so I needed both.  

I love how these sloths came out! In addition to the beautiful Island Batik fabrics, I used Aurifil thread 2340-Cafe au Lait for all the piecing, it matched the Sahara really well, even in closing up all the openings for stuffing.  Each sloth has 5 openings, so that was 15 places to stitch closed!  I did it while watching Bridgerton on Netflix so all that hand stitching went fast.  For the machine stitching I used a Schmetz microtex chrome needle.  Fire Monkey especially loves the velcro in the claws so it can give you a hug or hang off your arm.  

This is third Funky Friend pattern I've made. I let our sloths hang out with the other Funky Friends I've made that still live at our house, all made with Island Batik fabrics, of course.  The patterns are William Whale and Ollie the Laid Back Owl, though our whales are Celeste and Roderigo and the owl is Orion.  

 

If you want to try sewing soft toys, check out the Funky Friends Factory!  She even has a section on her website of patterns good for beginners.