A First Cat

This afternoon, as soon as I had my other stuff done, I wasted no time attempting to make a cat. Fortunately, the three books I'd ordered from Amazon arrived today, and so I had several cats to choose from. I chose to make this cat

from this book:

There are some really cute projects in this book. 

So the cat starts with making a cigar shape for the body, and a ball for the head. Then it says to wrap some wool around my finger for the neck and to use that to attach the head to the body. That wasn't completely clear to me, but this is what I ended up with. It also reminded me that the stomach of the cat is ideally more slender than the chest, and so I felted it a little extra there to slenderize its tummy. 

By the way, it was tempting to make a Smitty or a Gracie, but I decided to start with a George. Those of you who don't know George can see him at the bottom of my right side bar. Good old George.

After that I made some legs. The book points out that getting the proportions right is the hardest part of making the cat. I'm just about to demonstrate that to you.

I tested him out to see if he could stand on his own, and he could, although his legs seems a little flimsy to me. They probably should be compacted a little more before they're attached because it's hard to do once they've been attached to the body.

After that, I added the ears. I'm most proud of the ears on this first attempt. The book had me add the darker fibers to the inside of the ears after they'd been attached to the head. I think in future attempts, I'll do that first.

Then I did the rest of the face. There's something not right about the eyes. I think the green is too large, and I might have moved the white spot more to the center of the black and made it much smaller. I think the cheeks, nose, chin and mouth are pretty good for a first try. You can see the darker center of the ears in this image too.

He's a little fuzzy...obviously he needs some cleaning up too.

When I was in the workshop, Heidi pointed out that one of the challenges with wool felting is to decide how much wool to use for any given piece. On the face here, I did a pretty good job with the cheeks, chin and nose, but the eyes are definitely too bulky. I might be able to fix them with more felting, but for now, I'm leaving it as is.

Then I added the tail...probably a little thick, but there you go.

Finally, I gave him some whiskers, and voila!

It could be worse, right? I'm critiquing myself here, but I'm actually pretty happy with how he turned out for a first try. Hopefully, the next one will be better. 

I want to do a little more work on this one...try to make it less fuzzy, and I'd like to give him some stripes. That's as much as I'm going to do with him today, however. I need to let him sit for a while so that I can study him and decide how to proceed. His legs are a little too long for his body. I might be able to felt them closer at the shoulders to shorten them a little. We'll see. I had fun, and that's what counts.