Hey, guys. I made this dollhouse miniature black bear rug at someone’s request. It was fun (but tedious)! Since making that first one, I have received dozens of requests for more of these, plus polar bears, unicorns, and zebras.
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Pattern
Here is the pattern that I drew out for my bear rug. As I said above, this was intended for dollhouse miniatures and is therefore scaled at about 1/12th of real-life size, so it’s 6.5″ long by 5.5″ wide (but of course you can shrink or stretch it for other scales). I did some research as to how big a real bear rug might be, and all of the sites I came across that actually had measurements only mentioned length, so I did some guess-work to make the width look proportional. The head part of the drawing is mostly for reference when sculpting a head, and the fabric will be trimmed to size later. Alternatively, if you don’t want to sculpt a head, you could use the pattern to draw something instead!
Notes
One of my biggest goals was to use materials that I already had. So, I took a slightly unconventional approach to applying the fur…
Most people use loose fibers like wool roving or doll hair for fur. They glue on long clumps of it and cut it much shorter later. This just seemed messy and wasteful to me, and I didn’t want the colour of the head to not match the body. So, I took the less-wasteful approach and removed fur from the scraps of fabric that were left after cutting out the body.
To make this possible, it was REALLY helpful to have a hemostat (everyone’s got one of those, right? haha). They’re super handy and I recommend them to any one doing mini stuff, because you can lock them in place, so you don’t lose things!
So, below are my time lapse videos for this project. I divided it into two videos (the head, and the body) so they weren’t so un-bear-ably long, and in case someone only wanted to see one part and not the other. So, enjoy! Let me know what you think!