Book Review

Book Review from LK.

Thank You LK! I hope people keep 'em coming.



Good Design in Soft Toys by Rudi de Sarigny
ISBN 0800835700,
published in 1971.

Good Design in Soft Toys, a title still available via Ebay (www.ebay.com), Alibris (www.alibris.com) , Abe Books (www.abebooks.com ) and other used book web sites, has much to offer. Besides the usual assortment of vintage patterns for lambs, kittens, elephants, monkeys, bears, and ducks, there is a very well-written section on how to design your own toys. The author provides a discussion of using photos of animals as source imagery, about various techniques that add sophistication, and a very useful tutorial on how to design a properly fitted gusset so you can vastly improve the three-dimensionality of your toys. The author demonstrates the process of taking a design from inspirational image to finished soft toy. Using an image of a horse as an example, she first shows how to distill a simple pattern from the image, and then increases the complexity of the toy showing two additional, and more complex, versions. The patterns provided are quite nice, and I found the technical advice and tips to be incredibly useful.