Totoro Is Smiling To You!

This Totoro is more popular than any other buddy now. I posted it on my MakeWoolBuddies Facebook page three weeks ago and according to the crowdsourcing, this smiling Totoro was the big winner in the “beauty contest”. Haha, I'm so happy here, because I AM the maker of this perfect, vivid, fantastic, incredible Totoro ^0^!

So, if you want to learn the process of making a Totoro like this, you are on the right truck! Today, I'm going to write down the secrete process of making it. You can do it too as long as follow every step carefully! Ok, grasp some wool, a needle, let's do it!

1. Take a small handful of white wool, roll the wool tightly to make the base for the body shape. By compressing the wool together, the needle helps you speed up the felting process. Continue poking the wool until the shape is evenly round and like an egg.

2. Stretch a layer of gray wool to fully cover the body shape, then tighten it with felting needles.

3. Roll a small handful of white wool into an oval shape for the bust and tummy. Poke the white wool onto the front of the body, leaving half of the height for the head area.

4. Using small amount of gray wool, make one tail and two arms. You can just make three rounded balls. Poke the tail onto the lower back of the body, poke the arms on each side, and felt them together. 

5. Add more gray wool to help connect the edge of arms with the body, keep poking until they connected naturally. Now it's time to make its head part.

6. Stretch proper amount of while wool and poke it onto the face part, shape the teeth part by using your felting needle while poking. Likewise, poke two soybean-sized eye areas and black-soybean-sized nose area. Eye areas should be white and nose area should be gray. For Totoro's ears, make two black-soybean shapes and poke them on its head. 

7. Make some gray spots on the bust (like what I added in the picture above).

8. Eyes, nose and teeth. Roll two pinches of black wool and poke into the center of the two eye areas for pupils. Stretch a triangular nose on the nose area, make sure the base of the triangle up, then add two brown nares on it. The teeth part is the finishing point. For this part, remember the more you poke, the tighter the wool going to be? So my secret is using NO more wool but ONLY felting needles to poke them out! Be patient to poke hundred times for all the lines, lines must be absolutely straight since it affects the energetic smile directly! 

Wow! You just finish your own smiling Totoro! Congrats!

Learn To Make Your Wool Buddy Popular

  Two days ago, I asked my fans to make a choice between 2 completed wool Totoro (Cartoon character in Japanese animated film My Neighbor Totoro, which is written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced by Ghibli Studio) on my Facebook Fan Page. And I get a lot of answers and reasons of their choice. In order to get an objective and fair answer, I didn't tell them whom the 2 Totoros were made by. But at the end I told every choice maker that I made the smiling one. Here's the captured answer from this post:

Here is the result: 8 among 9 people chose Totoro B (the one has a green background). Big win of B! Only one person TingTing Xu chose the other one. Apparently, I get a very clear answer from this compare, totoro on the right side is the more popular buddy from people's aesthetic value. 

I find there are some factors or values make the Totoro B super popular according to the choice from the crowd:

1. Cute "Tosonality". It's the most frequent word appears in the comment board. That means it's really important for a buddy. Yali Yao, Ruichen Zhou and Justin Xu thought Totoro B was "cute". Dalu Li said "the left one is so ugly" and we can regard this reason as "not cute enough". While "cute" means a lot of things: good shape, proper scale, balanced design etc. Like Xiangfei Bai wrote "this one is really more three-dimentional" when it refers to Totoro B, so I believe he was talking about its chunky body and well-balanced shape.

2. Energetic Facial Expression. Both Ruila and Yali said they like B's "teeth", they like the smile on its face, so we see YiWen Hu wrote "Totoro B makes me feel hopeful and energetic". I guess the smile on B give this buddy more possible to be liked since people released their pressure after viewing it. That's also the reason why Ruila Lin said she felt the "humor inherent and full of surprise".

3. Details make it "alive". Angel Cabrera and Xiangfei Bai mentioned "detail" was the key factor helping them made the choice. Actually, details really helpful to emphasize the vivid feature of a buddy. But too many details could be a burden for a little craft. So that's the reason why Xu Tingting prefer the abstract one. After all, it just a wool craft or toy, we don't have to add every detail on it. So keep a balance on it will be an essential part.

4. Restore the original figure. Dalu Li said "because it looks like real totoro", which pointing out the more it likes the original character, the more he likes it. So here is someone who prefer concretization more and by no means dislike the abstract one. And YiWen Hu wrote "A looks like a nerd Totoro", that is a compare with the existing figure.

So now we get four principles from this crowd: Cute Figure, Facial Expression, Details, Revivification (if it has a well-known figure already). From now on, you will be able to design and make wool buddies that most people will love!