Since Australia Post suddenly remembered the “delivery” part of the mail system and delivered this to my friend Julie, I can now reveal the secret project I didn’t post last time.

See, Julie is obsessed with pandas, so I figured hey! I could make one! Turns out I could, although not terribly professionally.

The pattern is adapted from the Honey Bear pattern that you can get for no money by signing up for the newsletter at Funky Friends Factory.

When I saw the pattern printed out I thought “Oh holy shit, there is no WAY this is sewable!” but I have to say, like all the Funky Friends patterns, if you follow the instructions step by step you end up having no trouble at all.  Honey the Bear is also the official bear for an initiative called “A Billion Bears for Charity” which means you can make as many bears from the pattern as you like to sell to raise money for whatever charity you like – the designer simply asks you send her a photo of your bears and a count of how many you made so she can know when she hits a billion!

Panda-ising the pattern wasn’t complicated, it was just a matter of making different bits in different colours. The tricky part was the two tone body, which I did by marking on the pattern where the colour change would be, and then laying the pattern over a pre-prepared black and white block.  I didn’t quite match it on the back, but the rest worked out not badly.

The other thing was googling for “Panda butt” to check the colour and placement of panda tails, because most plush pandas seem to have black tails, and it turns out the real ones have a little white nub. Trust me, I’ve seen a LOT of panda butt of recent.

Julie loves him to bits, so despite all his wonky bits I think he worked out