Cute LED Stuffed Cat

This is a great little sewing project with a soft circuit incorporated. I am doing this one with all of my Makers this year. I wanted it to look like a cat but now that it is finished it looks a little batish and will be doing this one again with wings for Halloween!

Tools:

• Fabric Scissors
• Jewelry Pliers (or anything that can bend soft wire - I used an alligator clip)
• Needles

Materials:

• Gray Felt
• Pink Felt
• White Embroidery floss
• Gray Embroidery floss
• LED
• Snap
• Conductive Thread
• 3 Volt Battery with tabs (you can order these on amazon or aliexpress or solder your own tabs to a dollar store battery)
• Pattern (you can download it below)
• Poly Fiberfill or your preferred stuffing

Cut out the 'body' piece of your downloaded pattern and trace it 5 times on your gray felt. I used chalk so it brushes off easily afterwards. Cut out your felt pieces.

Choose a spot at about the middle of one of your felt pieces and embroider a cute face. I chose to make smiley eyes and a very simple nose/mouth combination.

Put two of your felt pieces together and sew along one side, joining them with the gray embroidery floss. I used a whip stitch (pictured in the graphic). Once you have completely joined one side add another piece by sewing a new piece to the side that is free. Continue to add pieces until they form a ball, stuffing the shape before sewing it closed.

Cut two triangles from the gray felt using the ear pattern piece. Sew these on to the top of the round shape using the whip stitch. When you have finished sewing them to the body pull them from the ends to make them stand up.

Cut a small heart out of pink felt using the pattern piece provided. Sew the heart to the body below the face. I only used a stitch in the middle for this as I knew that I would be sewing the LED over the heart.

The wires on LEDs are easy to bend into shapes that allow you to sew them to things!

You need to make sure you keep track of which side is positive and which side is negative.The positive side has the longer wire and will eventually be attached to the positive side of the battery. I mark the positive side with a red sharpie mark on the wire.

Now bend your wires carefully into the shapes pictured above. These wires bend easily. Be careful though, they also break off very easily. When bending the wires do it a little bit at a time to ensure your light continues to work.

After this step test that you have marked your wires correctly by tying conductive thread to either side of the LED and then touching the thread to the battery. This step checks that you marked your wires correctly and that you didn't break you LED while bending the wires into loops. Leave your conductive thread tied to the LED.

Attach the LED by taking both tails of the conductive thread attached in the last step and passing both ends through the side seams right beside them.

Attach the negative side of the LED to the negative side of the battery. Loop through the battery tab at least 3 times and tie a really secure knot. This thread is made of metal so it can unravel easily if the knot is not tied well. Also make sure that you conductive thread does not pass through the centre of the body. This is just a recipe for the negative and positive threads to touch in the middle of the body and short your circuit.

Using conductive thread, attach the positive side of the battery to one side of the snap.

Attach the positive side of the LED to the other side of the snap. Wrap the conductive thread with embroidery floss and tie and snip all of your spare threads.

Attach the snap and marvel at your strange little creation!