Mr. Fox

Been a while since I've made presents for a new baby. Some friends from college recently announced their first son! We always knew we would call it a Ringlet as a play on their last name. So I was very excited to think about making them something.

Anna, the mom to be, sometimes makes some super cool art and puts it up on her instagram.

today's art project: Mr. Fox. #nofilter #craypas #mixedmedia #fox #justanotherdayinthelife #theartofslowliving #sundayfunday

A photo posted by Anna Ring (@onering09) on Jun 5, 2016 at 7:51pm PDT

So when I saw this Mr. Fox guy, I thought he would make an excellent toy and drew up a sketch. Not too different from the

Mr. Skees Bears I made back in 2012

.

I think the hardest part was figuring out his football head shape. Fun fact: the technical, geometric term is prolate spheroid, but you can't search that term on Ravelry and get any results. I don't think I got it quite the right shape, but the top does have a nice taper and the overall head was pretty good I thought.

I made this toy with the same Jacques pattern (that I made the Skeesbears and

Monkeys

from) by

Pica Pau

, but again with my own head and a few alterations. The head has the same number of stitches in each row, I just moved all the increases out to the sides to get a much more oval shape.

The ears are shortened versions of the ones on

Pica Pau's free pig pattern on her blog

. The nose is a shorter variation of the one I made for the

wolves

. I did a little different with the nose this time and just embroidered over the top of my nose which added another dimension to the face which I really like.

ears and nose cone

I thought the head was a bit large compared to how I remember these turing out, but it is hard to tell since I do not have any of the monkeys, wolves or bears I have made at hand here. So I added one row to the shirt and the seat to make it a little longer. I also decided to make his feet in red, instead of black to give it a little more definition between them. I debated trying to make felt eyes like in the painting, but as this is going to a kid I wanted it to be baby friendly and parts that can come off are a no go. So he got 18mm safety eyes.

The arms are the same as the wolves and skeesbears with long sleeves and hands. I made a shorter, narrower version of the wolf tail for the fox. Then made up the tie and vest from the skeesbears. And finally I wanted to add those face whiskers that are in the original inspiration artwork. Those were just three shells on a short foundation row.

Once all the parts were made, it was only about another half an hour of assembly and sewing. I kind of really love the face whiskers and think they really make this guy cute.

Time to complete: 10 hours

Finished size: 11 inches tall

Difficulty: Easy