Coldest in Valleys: March 2014

I made a cuddlefish. He's based on the Australian Giant Cuttlefish, only about double the size and of course made in polarfleece.

If you have 5 minutes, watch this video about cuttlefish. If you have an hour, watch this:

It is completely worth it, I've seen it like three times. The image above is a tiny cuttlefish known as the striped pyjama squid, which is the cutest thing and the cutest name and is just begging for a Halloween costume. Highlights include the strobe light thingy some do to mesmerize their prey and a description of the mating habits of the Australian Giant Cuttlefish. This involves the larger males trying to out-bro each other with crazy color displays while the smaller males sneak past, disguised as female cuttlefish so they can nonchalantly hand a female their packet of sperm without anybody noticing. Cross-dressing color-changing cephalopods! How can you not enjoy it?

Anyway, this all started when I saw a link to instructions on making your own giant squid pillow. I modified the pattern pieces to be more cuttlefish-like (all that research turned in finding documentaries and running around the house pretending to be cuttlefish, which is difficult when you have a rigid skeleton and no color changing abilities) and stuffed the thing with the filling of two old pillows and a 32 oz bag of polyfill.

Housemates disguised as plaid cuttlefish are optional, but encouraged.

You can see the shape of the cuttlefish pattern pieces here. I did away with the bobbles on the ends of the tentacles because they were hard to turn right side out, and I sadly didn't go with the idea of elasticized feeding tentacles. This is missing the frill and an oval piece of the sucker fabric for the bottom of the head. I just sort of looked at the squid pattern and drew a cuttlefish instead. There was some measuring, but since my seam allowance turned out to be "you know, whatever" it did not matter very much.