Shoulder Meow-dy
Spring 2025
Stuffed animal reimagined to be a fashion piece and fidget toy!
Skills: 3D Modeling, Soft Fabrication, User Design Tools Used: Blender Modeling, Sewing Machine
Overview
For the midterm of my Toy Design and Prototyping class, I was tasked to design a soft toy for a specific person in my life and gift it to them. This was a class during my study away sememster, so for the person, I chose my friend that was studying abroad with me, she is a cat and fashion loving person who gets distracted really easily... can you see the inspiration now?
Final Product
Ideation
As I mentioned in the overview, my chosen person loves cats, and I love cats too. That's why I chose to make the toy a cat plush. Simple. But the road ahead was treacherous. In this class, the professor introduced the idea of "play value" to us, put simply, it is the amount of "play" that a toy can provide to someone through any type of interaction. For example, how long will a child play with a figurine until it is cast aside? What about a make believe set? Buildings bricks? Keeping all of this in mind, I didn't want to only create a stuffed animal shaped like a cat. So, you may ask, what did you add to make this stuffed animal of yours so special? I brainstormed for many days, went through many iterations, sketched many designs to finally come up with something I was satisfied with.
As my friend is into fashion, I made the stuffed animal a wearable to increase the "play value". This was something that I knew I wanted to add, but it was where that was the issue. In the end I decided on the shoulder, since I saw some cats on their owner's shoulders while out on walks (there are people out there living the dream life wow). Another thing that I wanted to add is a fidgeting element. To be very honest, I cannot study in the same room as this friend because they are very distracting so this is what inspired that. This element was what gave me the most trouble. While researching fidget toys, I noticed that many of them are hard toys, so it was hard to take inspiration from any of them. Genius struck me as I was getting in bed one night, I remembered many stuffed animals had retractable elements on them (ex. bunny with a carrot). This retractable piece made a vibration... that is sort of like a cat purring. This was the missing link that finished my idea. I rushed out of bed to sketch it, and returned back to bed victorious.
Fabrication
In my opinion this project is very idea and design heavy, so the fabricating proccess only has a few small hiccups along the way.
Before turning on any sewing machine, we need to create a sewing pattern first. I'll let you in on a secret, I had no idea how to make a sewing pattern... But we persist! I started with something I did know how to do: create a 3D model. Then, I used a platform called Plushify to chop it up into a flat sewing pattern.
And before chopping up my good fabric, I made a prototype to test the pattern out.
There were some adjustments to be made such as the size and length of certain parts, but everything worked out pretty well. The only problem was the balance. I wanted the user to be able to pull the string of the retractable element without having to hold onto the plush for a more smooth experience. This issue was solved by adding some weight in the tail to counter balance the pulling, it made the whole toy more stable too which was an added bonus.
And so with all of my problems solved, I could finally confidently cut into my good fabric and create the final toy! And if you were wondering, yes I did give the toy to my friend in the end. The one in the demo video is a second one I made for myself. Here's a fun video of her first impressions.
Bonus!
I also participated in the NYU Shanghai IMA Spring Show with this project and some other toys I made during the sememster. It was a really fun experience! I loved seeing people take picutres with the Shoulder Meow-dy and I received a lot of positive feedback. It is kind of interesting to me how a toy designed for one person ended up having more mass appeal than I thought.
