Marjorie the Accessorized Elephant

Here's my elephant for Claire's Month of Softies project. As you can see her accessory is a bow! The bow was inspired by this drawing Tim did of his friend Becky's grandmother Marjorie as a child.

I had so much trouble trying to decide what way to go with this elephant! First I was going to use the same pattern I used to make this elephant. This was the first stuffed animal I made back in July from a pattern in a 70s soft toy book from the library. Actually the same book Claire mentioned on her site, The Splendid Soft Toy. I have her to blame for this newfound obsession with toy making! Anyway, so I was going to then put it on wheels like an old time pull toy, kind of like this. Then I scrapped that idea and decided to make her more like Gertie but with rollerskates. I found this excellent pastel rainbow kid's sweatshirt at the thriftstore that I was going to make into a rad outfit and then try to replicate exactly the awesome rollerskates I had as a preteen. White leather lace up skates with neon green wheels. I was even going to accessorize the rollerskates with those big poms. Oh how I wanted those for my skates! But then the elephant head on a skinny Gertie body was weird and I couldn't figure out how to make lace up skates to fit on wide elephant legs. So then I was going to make old metal buckle on skates but I couldn't figure those out either. So finally I ditched the skates altogether and here she is. Not on wheels but hopefully her bow is so big no one will notice!