Beating a Dead Horse

About a month ago, a friend of ours walked into game night and asked me "Can you make me a dead horse?" Apparently, a particular topic keeps coming up in meetings on which nobody is able or willing to make any headway. This is, understandably, quite frustrating. So, he requested a plushy, cartoony dead horse he can throw on the table and proceed to beat with something, but would still be soft and cuddly. He specified something between 3 and 4 feet long, complete with X's for eyes and yarn hair. Ok, I thought. Sounds entertaining, anyway.

I figured, ok, I don't have to get terribly fancy, I just have to shoot for recognizable. So if you break it down, you can make the body and legs from cylindars, the muzzle and neck out of tilted cone shapes. The tricky bit is getting the proportions right, and this is where chance threw me a bone.

My boss came upon a fairly realistic looking horse toy in the trash one day. It was one of the things that has a rebar skeleton inside so a small child can sit on and ride it. The batteries in the sound device had worn out, and the neck seam was torn open, with the stuffing coming out. So, knowing I had this project in mind, she picked it up and tossed it in her trunk. This is it:

It's only about 24 inches tall. I had thought about pulling the rebar and stuffing out, washing him and restuffing him in a comedic way and make my life generally easier. But come on; it's two feet tall, and not even remotely ridiculous looking, and I just couldn't do enough twisted things to it to satisfy my twisted creativity. So I went to the fabric store. $42 later I had lots of fleece pieces of varying colors and lengths, two packages of large ric-rac, and a 5 pound box of stuffing.

I got out my measuring tape and started measuring various dimensions of the existing horse and writing them down on my various scribbled diagrams on cut-up paper bags, expressing the dimensions in terms of X so I could scale the horse up as desired. Then I got to measuring out and cutting various big rectangles of fleece based on those calculations, and sewing them together.

In general, the horse turned out quite a bit bigger than expected, so I suppose I got something wrong in the length of the body and the head. The legs are also woefully short, but I can solve that by sewing in socks (or pasterns, or fetlocks, I'm not sure what the classifications are anymore, merely that they exist to describe the length of the white area on a horse's legs down to its hooves. And no, I don't feel like looking them up on Wikipedia just now, either). His tail is also a bit short, but we can just say it's been docked. and yes, in this pic his legs are still unfinished, but you get the idea.

I wanted it to be clear that the horse was dead, probably by several different means. I also wanted it to be interactive, because that's more fun and twisted. So, I figured it would be pretty easy to have the horse die of hanging (just need to make the noose), disease, or broken heart. If I have the time and wherewithall, I might even work in some alien spawn and some gunshot wounds. Some of these methods show up externally, some internally. This means I needed an organ sac. I whipped up some plush intestinal tract and a heart and sewed them into a rectangular red piece of fleece.

I hope to get ahold of a little cthonid or alien to stick in there. I suppose I could also have put a small red throw blanket in there, either for a pool of blood or for a quick nap.

Our friend had wanted the cartoony X eyes. Sounds like fun, but can I take it a step further? I thought it might be fun to have an eye coming out, but to have it be detachable to help keep things easy. So, the eyespots are the loop side of velcro to keep the entire body soft, with a small bit of the hooks to keep the eye on. I made the eye by covering a styrofoam ball with a layer of muslin, then a scrap of china silk, then painting on the details with fabric paint.

I wanted the tongue to loll out of the mouth, and possibly be something to pull on. I made it from a few long pieces of lime-green fleece, and then threaded a wide piece of elastic into it and gather-stitched it down to make the back of the tongue stretchy. I extended the red of the inside of the mouth into a long pocket on the inside and stitched the tongue into the end. I then tethered the back of the pocket to the corner of the organ sac so that the tongue would hopefully retract somewhat into the body, keep itself free of the stuffing inside, and help keep the organ sac in place. I painted the tongue with some red and black bumps to make it look particularly nasty.

So that's what I've got so far. I still need to make the socks and the hooves, make a noose, and make a few other bits and pieces if time permits. For now, this is what I've got, and it's an interesting romp!