Mr. Potato for Christmas

There is this great blog called U-Create. It's just a lot of posts and links to great ideas. I love it.
A fabric Mr. Potato was posted, with a tutorial from MAKE IT AND LOVE IT. So you can do what I did, and use her great idea to make a potato of your own. I just want to give full credit for the fabric Mr. Potato idea to Ashley from Make It and Love It. I love these crafty blogs, they have such great ideas, and are so willing to share with others!

So building on from that idea....

I did quite a bit different potato from the Make It and Love It tutorial. The biggest changes I wanted for my own fabric Mr. Potato:

-NO POCKET ON THE BACK. It was such a cute idea, but I knew I'd want too many body parts, and they wouldn't fit in a pocket. In Ashley's tutorial she mentioned how next time she'd make a pleated pocket to hold the parts better. So as I was brainstorming ideas of what to put the body parts and potato in, I had such a great idea:

A POTATO SACK!

So I started searching for potato sack images. I found this online art exibit from Boise State University of all the Idaho potato sacks. It was a gold mine for potato sack ideas. I was browsing along, and found one Idaho logo "RJ Brand". I died. My son's name is Rhett James, but we call him RJ. So I knew that would be my potato sack model. I just love the way the potato sack turned out.

The previous post is a whole tutorial of how to make a potato carrying sack of your own!

So enough about the sack because I have a whole post on it.

OTHER CHANGES I MADE ON THE POTATO:

-No Felt. I am kind of anti-felt. Sometimes I wish I wasn't. It's cheap, you can leave raw edges, bright colors, makes crafting so easy...but I can't stand the way it feels. The fuzzy synthetic--it's like finger nails on a chalk board to me. So my potato is out of tan fleece, and all the parts are from scraps.

-Applique Body Parts: I decided I would prefer flat body parts. For two reasons, no stuffing required, and I thought if they were flat they'd lay better on the already rounded potato. Also, I was not using felt and chose to recycle the scraps I already had. So the back of each body part is a scrap of heavy upholstery with the velcro.

***One tip I've liked so far is to put the sticky/ scratchy half of the velcro on the potato, and the soft/ fuzzy side of your velcro on the parts. That way, in the sack, the parts don't stick together.


The ears are 3 pieces, so they can stand perpenicular to the potato's head out the sides. I only made one pair of ears, I'm hoping to add more ears. I need a girl pair with earrings.

I use fusible interfacing for all my applique to help keep it stiff. The thick upholstery backing also helps a lot.

Some fun ideas I had on the body parts:

baseball mit hand: the elbow is bent.

shoes: embelished with ribbon and lace for the girl, ribbon shoe laces for boy

glasses: the shape of the glasses stink, not even symmetrical. but I was excited I had some plastic vinyl sheeting from when I recovered a vintage high chair. I sewed the plastic inbetween the layers for lenses. Good idea, not the cutest result. The glasses stick to the eyebrow velcro.

It all fits really well in the potato sack. There's room to add more body parts!

I would like to make more eyebrows, ears, hats/ hair for now.

My son is 20 months old and this is his Christmas pretty much. Mr. Potato and a DVD and whatever grandma's get him. He's had a sneak peak here and there and so far has loved it!