A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to Fang Shui, or Why Fang Shui Is a Flounder.
Fang Shui is/was my first attempt at a fancy Eastern dragon. Growing up, I used to create patterns of stuffed animals to make for my brothers and sisters. I also used to sew Barbie clothes and other things – all on an antique Singer Treadle sewing machine.
I’ve come a long way since then, but the lessons I learned on that first primitive sewing machine have stood me in good stead. I have a Kenmore Sensorsew now, and when my Grandmother can bear to part with it, a very nice Pfaff that will likely last the rest of my life.
My mom keeps several machines, which she has threaded with different colored threads so she doesn’t have to rethread them very often – it slows her down too much. She’s a marathon quilter who does some of the most amazing stuff. She should have her own art show. My favorite that she's made for me is what I call her Origami quilt, though I suspect there is actually a proper name for the technique she used in it.
If my house ever burns down, it’s the cedar-lined trunk with all my mom’s quilts in it that I grab first. I guess my husband had better have the other end of it. I’d miss him too.
My grandmother just loves technical gadgets – it doesn’t matter what kind. I truly believe she was the first person in Kansas to own a 1)microwave, 2) home trash compactor, 3) solar panels on her roof(which I can’t believe a tornado still hasn’t taken), 4) 3 juicers (because each succeeding one had a feature the previous model sadly lacked), 5) and a fireplace that needs a remote control to operate. She has a lot of other widgets, but I don’t think she was the first in Kansas to own them, just the second or third. Her kitchen should have been the one used for the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey(that was made in 1968).
My mom, on the other hand, didn’t own a color television until I went away for college (that was 1982). She left a VCR she was given for Christmas in its box for two years, until I was able to come home to hook it up and make notecards on how to operate it. She finally got the house she bought rewired so that she could operate a hotplate and the refrigerator at the same time. That was a very happy, exciting time for her. She mentioned not living somewhere called ‘Green Acres’ anymore. She still can’t be reached by phone. I have to call my Grandmother to pass messages.
And yet it was my mother who gave me my love for Science Fiction. She’d rather have root canal surgery than admit to a stranger that’s what she reads– but if you look at her book shelves, it’s all she owns. There were only two programs we were allowed to stay up to watch growing up: Original Kung Fu, and Original Start Trek. It explains a whole lot about me. Mom introduced me to Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. LeGuin, CJ Cherryh, and Donald Kingsbury. My mother is a mystery, wrapped in an enigma.
But I’ve digressed away from Fang Shui, my first attempt at a fancy Eastern Dragon. The way I would make patterns was to look at a picture of the animal I wanted to make, and break it down into shapes. I’d flatten out the shapes in my head, then draw them out. There was no formal training, just a lot of measuring and adjusting involved - and there still is, but I've become pretty good at getting where I intended to go.
Or so I believed. The pictures of Eastern Dragons you see always show a coiling, writhing body, with its legs clawing at the air every which way. That looks great, on paper. I cleverly downsized the pattern so as to not waste too much velvet on the small chance he had some minor imperfections that needed to be corrected. Here’s my first attempt:
He doesn’t look like he’s clawing at the air, so much as he’s frantically attempting to reach a swarm of biting vorpal fleas. I keep him as a souvenir of my journey as a seamstress, and as a reminder to myself that overconfidence can lead to the loss of several yards of really wonderful patterned velvet – and because no one else would ever want such a sad-looking creature inhabiting their home. You'd think I had learned my lesson, but no.
So it was back to the drawing board. I decided maybe the kicking/clawing thing wasn’t as cool in the stuffed animal world as it was on paper. I decided to make him a very down-to-earth Eastern Dragon, with all four paws planted firmly on terra firma. He could look just as majestic without all the pinwheel commotion. But I didn’t want to start from square one. I wanted to fix the pattern I had already invested a great many woman-hours in. I _liked_ how the body coiled, and the fringe of whiskers and the antlers and the red bushy eyebrows. I was quite happy with everything but the legs. I needed them all pointing downward like any sane animal, and the toes pointed forward, because anything else would just look silly.
This is the point at which Fang Shui became a Flounder. Sort of. I mean, his eyes are on either side of his face. But if you uncoil the body in your head and think carefully, you’ll notice that all four of Fang Shui’s legs are on just one side of his body. It’s the coils. I _tried_ to dole out the legs so there were two on each side, but the coils foiled me. He couldn’t stand on all four feet if I treated him like a normal animal. He’d be handicapped for life like his predecessor. So I made him the flounder of the Dragon world, and I thought that was that. I made a second Fangshui in the small size, just to make sure I had corrected the problems I saw in the first model. Okay. Much better.
I decided I didn't like having the head swung so far to the side - I wanted him to be a more forward thinker, and his tail should really trail behind him, rather than be tucked up against his butt. He also needed some orthodontal care - but a couple of surgically placed darts in the ol' gumline would fix that. All those adjustments were small. I could handle that in my sleep. I also decided that when he was bigger, his antlers should be in an ivory satin, so they'd stand out better from his body. That was an easy fix as well. So I resized the pattern and made the adjustments to his neck, mouth, antlers and tail.
I then had the brilliant idea of cutting out two at one time, to save time, and to have Fangshui that were sort of mirrored bookends of each other. AHA!! I thought to myself. How clever am I. It could be a selling point for buying two of them as a set! I was so confident of this mental picture, I didn't realize my error until I started stuffing the first one. It happened to be the Fangshui cut out on the reverse of the pattern. My flounder Fangshui became an Oni flounder Fangshui, with his feet on backwards but all still perfectly aligned with the ground. Reversing the coil reversed the side that the feet were on, you see. And genius me didn't catch that glaring fact until about $60(I always buy on sale) worth of fabric was used and after spending over 10 hours sewing him together!
I was going to have to move the legs from one coil side to the other, if I wanted my bookend Fangshui. That seems perfectly obvious in hindsight. And I may still do it, despite the fact it will save me no time at all, since I'll have to cut out each Fangshui individually still, and effectively double the number of puzzle pieces I have to not get mixed up.
Here's the final prototype Fangshui, whose brother has the awkward footing problem. She rests, coiling majestically - all 11 tightly wound feet of her - her head only slightly turned as though something had caught her eye.
Now I just have 99 more to make. At about 14 hours of work per dragon, plus the development time, hmm, that adds up to about 1500 hours. Now if I were to treat Fangshui as a full-time job, and devote 40 hours a week to her production... that means I can crank out a zippy 3 a week... for about 33 weeks or three-fourths of a year and some change of dedicated sewing time...
The designers who just made their Asian dragon bodies a wavy squiggle to simulate all that pinwheel commotion are looking smarter and less like slackers all the time. I'm beginning to suspect they had a good reason to avoid the whole coiling body thing, other than the dozens of pattern pieces involved. And it only took me 100 hours or so to figure it out. That's okay. Lesson learned, right? I am confident that designing SLEET, the Northern Dragon - my next limited edition dragon - will go much smoother, with his articulated wings and asymmetrically posed limbs. And did I mention that his body was going to be done mainly in white velvet?..
This is a cautionary tale. Feel free to point fingers and laugh, but learn from my mistakes. Real professional toy designers do their test toys in cheap muslin first, to avoid the pain of losing the good fabric. Muslin is also much easier to work with, and you can write and draw on it when planning corrections - a big help in adjusting lines on your pattern. As a kid, I didn't know any better, and I would have been appalled at the thought of trying to get my allowance stretched to the buying of test fabric, anyway. I would tape my paper patterns together very carefully as though it were the fabric to see if it was close to what I wanted. That was the extent of my test runs, and with a lot simpler patterns. Now, like my mother before me, I just don't have the patience. I want to see it in all its glory NOW, not two toys from now. But I am going to turn over a new leaf, put my best presser foot forward, and look for a sale. If I have the muslin sitting there on the shelf in front of me, I'll feel obligated to use it, right?..
Now we get to the punchline of all this. Mad scientists are considered mad because they cut corners and don't pay any thought to the possible ramifications of their experiments - they have good intentions almost always - but that messy middle part always seems to lead them astray. Hence the mad scientist theme of this website, which references more my approach to making toys, than the toys themselves!
Respectfully,
Leigh Martin
aka Dr. Moraih