How to make a plush Space Core (from Portal 2)

Ba ba ba. Bababa. Space. Ba.

Materials:

Light grey, black, and yellowish-orange fleece

Medium to dark grey sheet-type fabric

This pattern. (Which belongs to the folks at www.silverseam.com. I'm not making money off of this.)

A sewing needle

White and black thread, grey if you can find it

Fluff

Optional Materials:

A sound-chip-thing *

How to actually make it

Start by printing out the pattern above so it fills the entire length of a sheet of US letter paper. Cut it out, and then trace it seven times onto the light grey fabric. Make sure to leave slightly more than half an inch in between the shapes on the fabric so you can cut them out with a bit of room to spare. 

Now sew the pieces together on the lines you traced, except for half of one side on the last one. You will have an inside-out sphere with a slit down one side. Turn it the correct way out. Put the fluff in it until it feels like you want it. (This would be the correct time to put the sound chip in. Just remember where you put it so you can find it later. Draw a dot on thefabric or something.) Now that it has insides inside of it, sew up the rest of the slit. Fold the edges under when you sew it so they don't stick out, and so your sphere doesn't have a bulge there.

Cut out two black fleece circles whatever size looks right and sew them over the holes where all of the circle parts intersect. They will be very close to the size of the yellow circle you cut out later.

Cut a rectangle out of the darker grey fabric. This will go behind the eye-piece. Make it a bit bigger than you want it to be, because you will be folding the corners and edges under so they don't fray. Once you've cut it out, fold the edges under as you sew so it's roughly this shape:

Take your yellowish orange fabric and cut a circle that will fit in your rounded rectangle. That will be the "eye". Before you sew that on, though, you need a black circle of the same size. Once you have the black circle, you will cut chunks out of it so it takes on an asterisk shape. Something like this:

You could either sew each... tine? (Branch? Arm? Protrusion?) on to the yellow circle, two at a time, or glue the asterisk on. I sewed it on because I only had the kind of glue that comes on a stick, and it just seemed more professional to sew it. I'm sure either way would work; just put it on there somehow. Then, sew the eye bit on in the middle of the rounded rectangle.

This next part, the handles, is a pain in the ass. Just letting you know. If you've been waiting for a place to stop, maybe go do whatever it is you do while not destroying the facility eat dinner, or sleep, or just take a break, this is the time.


Okay, you're back. The handles. Cut a strip of the darker grey fabric, about fifteen to sixteen inches (I think that's about 40 or 50 centimeters) long and a little less than six inches (15 cm) wide. Hold it up where it will be and see what looks right.

Fold it into thirds, then fold the two edges in towards the center. Fold that in half and sew along where those two edges meet. Once you're satisfied with how that looks, decide exactly where you want the bends to be. Make a note of it, draw a dot there or something, and then sew the insides of the corners together.

Then line up the handle a whatever angle you would like it to be at, probably slightly angled forwards. Sew the two sides firmly onto the black circles on the sides. (I do realize that they should be attached closer to the outside of the sphere, but this was sturdier.)

Repeat those steps for the other handle. When they're both attached, cut two sqaures of the black fleece, each about three and a half inches wide (Those using the metric system, just cut them into a size that looks right). Roll one around the middle of each handle and sew them so they won't unroll.

And you have a space core! Congratulations. It may have a few creative liberties taken with it, and is nowhere near as cool as this Wheatley puppet someone made, but you know. Still pretty cool


*The best place to find one would be Build-a-Bear. They sell them separately from the bears for eight dollars. The audio quality will, of course, be horrible. Unless you can impersonate the space core really well, you'll be stuck recording off of your computer. (Here is a website with mp3s of pretty much everything the core says.)

If you're so inclined and have the circuit board and wires and a speaker and all of that, you could make your own. I don't really know how to do that, and have none of those things, but if you do, it would just turn out that much better.