How to Stuff Body & Sew Close a Stuffed Animal

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Karen for Expert Village. Now, we'll stuff the body. Just small clumps at a time makes it a lot easier to manage it. If you try to take too large an amount at once, it's too difficult and bunches up and gets in the way. You can push extra stuffing into this area here. The idea is to end stuffing just the immediate area around the hole. That's a little too much, so I'm going to take some out. We're pushing that in. The way you stuff it is important because if you just start jamming the stuffing into the stuffed animal without doing the legs and the head and the tail first, you'll end up with really flat floppy legs, tail and head and a tight body. This way if we do the head first and the legs and the tail, then we end up with nice firm extremities and a nice firm middle. Now we're all stuffed. He's so cute. We're going to sew up the side. Now I'm going to sew up the side of the doggy. You want to just push in that stuffing so it's no in you way. I have a threaded needle with a good size knot and I'm going to put my needle in through the hole and coming out to the front and pull that knot inside so we're not going to see it. Then just do the same whip stitch to finish off. It might be a little bit harder but not really. If the stuffing is hanging out and you want, then you can just push it, push it in there tight. Then after you finish stitching, you can squeeze and shift the stuffing around a little bit in the body section, but clear it away from the opening so you can work easily. We're pretty tight to the end here and we're not going to knot it on the inside because we can't do it on the inside this time so we're just going to put one more thread through. There's our loop. Pull that loop. There's another loop. We'll just cut that off fairly close. That's pretty neat. It's okay to have a knot on the outside. Next, we're going to sew our nose and our eyes."