When I was doing GCSE Creative Textiles many many years ago one of the things the course included was ‘soft sculpture’: using fabric to create facsimiles of objects. I never thought I’d be using those techniques in real life. But last weekend I found myself recreating a prop from my son’s favourite TV programme in fabric and it’s actually a pretty similar process.

The prop is the ‘gizmo’ from Andy’s Dinosaur Adventures. It’s a blue mobile phone-like device that the lead character wears strapped to his arm. The gizmo is quite thick, so I used some scraps of foam heat resistant table covering to stuff it and give it shape. I also used heavy weight iron-on interfacing on the back of the blue felt body fabric.

The gizmo has a screen, which I made with black felt, and some controls which I machine embroidered. It attaches to an arm band with Velcro. Here’s the body fabric with the screen, embroidery and Velcro applied before I sewed it up.

The arm band is a rectangle of sweatshirting fabric. It is wrapped around the arm and is held together with Velcro on the long edges. The gizmo attaches to two smaller strips of Velcro.

And here’s the finished object. It’s already been well loved and the felt fabric is showing the effects. In Creative Textiles we used to use cotton twill fabric and paint it with glue to make our soft sculptures have a bit of body. I don’t think I’ll be going as far as using glue, but I bet denim or gabardine would work for the body fabric and be harder wearing.

I made a proper pattern for this, which turns out to be a good thing because we recently discovered Andy’s Wild Adventures; a very similar series to Dinosaur Adventures but the gizmo in it is red not blue. So this weekend I may be making a red version.