Art for Kids: How to Make a Soft Sculpture Face

Video Transcript

"And now we're going to make a soft sculpture face that you can make to add on to a little toy or to make into a piece of interesting jewelry. For this clip you need some stuffing, some old pairs of tights, needle and thread, small black beads and bits of trimming and a pair of scissors. This you need your pair of tights. Cut a length from them and then open up the tube, open it out and it's a square. And to the middle of that square, you need to put a tiny little pom pom of polyester stuffing and then wrap around it and that is going to be quite a large nose. What you want to do when you've got the nose is stitch through the stem of the nose with your thread so the nose, that's going to be a nose, is secure in the middle and then disappear that thread back into the back of the, of the tights. Open it out wide and you should see now you've got a square of tights and a little ball of stuffing in the middle. Now I need to get the ball of fabric, of stuffing, fabric stuffing, and wrap the whole thing in there. Wrap it right round to the back. And then with my needle and thread, I need to catch all those edges. So you need a knot in your thread so it doesn't fall right through. Gather all the ends at the back and stitch through them a couple of times to keep it nice and secure. That should hold it tight, hold the nose in place and hold all the stuffing in. So a couple more stitches at the back to secure it. Now then we're going to put the eyes on. If we imagine that's the nose, we want the eyes to either side and a little bit higher up. So with my thread I'm going to through right from the back. Mind your fingers, mind where it comes out. Try to judge a nice distance away from the nose. That's come out so now I can put the bead on the thread. That's the first eye, pull it through, and exactly where it's come out, stitch it back down and all the way out to the back of the head. There comes the needle, pull it through. Now the eye's in place and I pull hard. Don't leave it on the surface, pull hard and down and it gives a depression around the eye. You can secure that with a couple of stitches. And make sure you've made a little depression around the eye because that gives the face character. And back up from, right from the back of the head out to where you want the other eye to be. Pull it through, put another bead on. Sometimes the beads don't go over the needle. It depends on what kind of needle you've got. So just choose one that will. Let's come out, the beads on, and then it goes back through, out of the back of the head. There it is, and again, pull hard until you start to get the features matched. Now you've pulled hard, keep it tight, and go over again. A couple of over should do the job. For the mouth, decide where you want the smile to be. Come out at one end of the smile and then over to the other end of the smile. Now make that smile really, really wide. Why didn't you want it to be? Because when you pull the thread, it's going to go in. Now back out at the back of the head now. We pull and we just encouraged that stitch to go down a bit so the stuffing comes up a bit and it should help the face to smile. So we want more stuffing at the top of the stitch, less at the bottom. And can you see how that's starting to smile now? Now pull it tight and we get a little goofy face that looks if it needs its false teeth putting in. We're out at the back, pull it tight again and go over and over again. Check again at the front, that's looking good. I'm just going to leave that thread because I might want to stitch it onto a safety pin to make a brooch or stitch it onto something else to make a toy. Now then we want the trimmings. So we can choose some nice, dark, fake fur fabric and give it, oh this looks like an interesting character. He could have been one of Fred Flintstone's friends I think. But he needs a little bit of color in his cheeks. So I get a felt tip pen and just dots that come around. Don't make it thick, because it will look too silly. Just dot some color on as if you're giving him a bit of make-up. You can rub it in. A little bit of color around the mouth. You can put eyebrows on. Just a little line. Nothing too dark, nothing too definite. There we are. We can make a pair of glasses, you can give it a beard, you can make it into any character you like. And that's how to make some squashy, fabric friends. Bye bye, bye bye."