So you've got your creature t-shirt, and now you want to put it together right? Well, here's where you'll learn the basics of creature construction!

Cutting the Pieces

Most creatures will come with a thick black outline. This thick line represents where you should cut. When you're cutting the creature out, be sure to cut through both layers of the t-shirt (unless your shirt states otherwise) so that you have a front and a back piece of each section. Here are some images to help you with this:

Getting Ready to Sew

Before you sew, you need to make sure that all your pieces are turned so that their right sides face inwards, like this:

This means that when you come to turn your creature inside-out after you've sewn around them, then the seams will be on the inside and everything will look much neater. You need to turn ALL the pieces so that their right sides face in, you should end up with them all looking like this:

Sewing

Sewing your creatures is DEAD easy. It totally helps if you have a sewing machine though, but if you don't it'll just take a little while longer. You can decide if you want to use a thread that compliments your print colour (pink, yellow etc) or if you'd just like to use white. Using a coloured thread isn't a massive thing, as you will barely be able to see it... but it can add a little bit of fun to your finished Ungleforian! Most of the creatures have a dashed 'sewing' line, which should still be visible from the wrong-side of the fabric. You should follow this line when you sew! If your creature pattern doesn't have one of these, don't worry! It's just how the design was made. For you, just sew about 5-7mm from the edge of the fabric.

On a sewing machine, just use your regular straight stitch, or if you're a fancy pants you can use an overlock stitch for security. By hand, the best stitch you can use is a 'back stitch'. So you just need to stitch around the body, the arms and the legs. BUT! Be sure to leave your stuffing and turning gap. Some of the creatures have these noted on their pattern, if yours doesn't, dont worry, just leave a 2-3cm gap at the bottom of the creature, and on the arms and the legs. You're going to sew this up in the next step anyway!
Onwards!

Turning out & Stuffing

This is where it gets super fun and you can see what your creature will eventually look like! So, turning out. You need to turn your creature and all their limbs back so the right sides are outside. You do this by poking the top most part of the creature through the stuffing hole, it's hard to explain, so here's a photo of me making one:

Get the idea? Right, so do that all all the pieces. Done? ok. Now you need to make sure the seams are fully pushed out, so get a pencil (use the wrong end), or a pen, tweezers? any pokey device really. Run that around the inside of the creature, just pushing the seams right out, like this:

Now to stuff! Use toy stuffing, or if you don't have any, cotton wool (don't wash your creature with this though!), or even scraps of the orginal shirt! Stuff as much as you want into your creature through the hole you left when sewing. Make sure you stuff all the limbs, too. You can use your pokey decive to get the stuffing right into the awkward places.

Sewing up Holes & attaching limbs!

Almost done now! time to sew up all the holes. Whenever I've made plush creatures, I always sew them up with a particular stitch called 'Ladder Stitch', it gives a really neat finish to the hole and makes the seam look just like the rest of the seams. If you google it, there's load of sources! You should sew up all the holes, then you'll be left with pieces like this:

To attach the limbs, you can either use glue, sew them on, or even use velcro! Velcro is wicked fun if you have more than one creature, as you can then mix and match their limbs! You can get hold of tiny circles of self adhesive velcro that would work fantastically for this project. Now you'll have your completed Ungleforian!

Check out other people's creatures in the gallery, and send your own photos in! You can also find the species of Ungleforian you have by looking at the creature guide :)