When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Abby Guinea Plushies!

I like going to fabric stores just to look for more materials to use for my plushies. I'm always on the lookout for classics as well as some new and fun fur colors. A while ago I found some nice guinea pig appropriate black fur, so I bought the whole bolt. When the fur is packaged at the factory, they fold the fur in half and wrap it around a flat board, making it easy to store and display. After I brought my roll of fabric fuzziness home and unfurled it, I noticed that someone must not have been paying attention when it was rolled up at the factory.... the outside of the fur was smooth and flat, but the fur on the inside was messed up, sticking up in all directions.

So here I am, with several feet of black fur, half of which is smooth and flat and the other half is unusable.

Or is it?

I attempted to brush the fur out with a dog grooming slicker brush, but to no avail. Then I realized I'd seen fur like this before... on guinea pigs. Abyssinian guinea pigs! They're a breed of cavy known for having rosettes all over their bodies, making their fur stick out in all directions. I really hate being wasteful, so this was a great realization. I made a bunch of little abby plushies. Previously, I'd only made abbies as custom piggies, since I'd have to manually twist and pinch the fur into rosettes. Since the fur is already "abbied", I can make these with no additional effort so I sell them at the same price as my other regular plushies. I've listed each plushie individually in both my Artfire shop and my Etsy shop since each one has its own unique fur pattern.

So when life gave me lemons, or in this case messed up fur, I made abby guinea pig plushies!