This post covers everything from the idea to completed prototypes! If you've ever been curious about the plush making process this might interest you. A lot of work goes in to designing a whole line of plush, and there's hours and hours poured in to it before the first prototype is even begun.

Deadweights sat on a random page in my OneNote files for over a year as just "Dead weights? Weighted things but dead?" Not a lot to go on and not very inspired in and of itself, so it sat untouched for a long, long time. Eventually I wanted to challenge myself to design some teddies since they are very unlike the sort of plush I usually make. I was having a lot of frustration with my other creative endeavors at the time, so maybe something new was just what I needed. I dug through all the bits and scraps where I had abandoned ideas and this ended up being what jumped out.

So I went a little further by establishing some basic necessities. Each creature had to be significantly different from the others, each one had to be based on at least 1 phrase with dead in it, and ideally I should be able to loop most of them back in to the theme that didn't take too much explaining beyond whatever story I could give them.

Bullseye and Crosshair are the last to be unlocked, but they are the first ones I designed! They set the look for the entire line. They were inspired by bicephalic calves, most specifically a pair named Gemini. It was a lot of feeling around in the dark to find something more cutesy than what I typically go for, and I had to figure out how toony I was going to let it get too. You can tell in this original sketch timelapse that I was really scribbling and chucking out stuff for the face. I was even unsure of the body. This early in the process you can only be so married to any particular idea. I think they turned out much cuter than if I'd run with the first attempts!

Once there was a single complete concept it was just a matter of repeating the process while making up more and more design rules along the way. I was aiming for a set with many different creatures: a fish, reptile, invertebrate, bird, and 3 mammals: marsupial, hooved, and predator.

Here are some sketches that got completely changed or dumped along the way. A rat, a very bad try at a ringtail, Hugs's original species as a ringed python for dead ringer, a scribbled shark for dead in the water before I had my fish designs figured out, and a chameleon for dead giveaway. Those last 3 I would really like to make something of and use. Can you imagine the cute little chameleon paws in fluffy soft fabric???

I struggled with what exactly to do with Bullseye & Crosshair. The first one is interesting but it would have been an absolute nightmare to make production friendly. The second wasn't as cute to me. Ditching the full cream face for a heart like the tilted conjoining was the right call I think.

Briefly I had Dropsy in pink and tried to make Bullseye & Crosshair fit the mold for orange, but it was a disaster. I considered making Bullseye and Crosshair pink, but there's already enough strawberry milk cows out there to satiate the fans of the concept I'm sure. So I decided no pink for now and honestly.. when I make a mainly orange plush it never does well. Bull 'n Cross were not about to be sacrificial calves on the altar of my favorite color.

So I determined I wanted a rainbow of colors with either a pink or red to start, the yellow and orange being on the same creature, and the addition of a greyscale and a brown. I colored the sketches, sometimes in multiple ways, and landed on these.

I eventually ended up with what felt like a solid foundation, but I knew I was going to have to put more thought in to them. However there were 2 potential usurpers in the midst of all these sketches: a salmon and a tarantula. And oh my gosh, do I ever love this salmon and tarantula. But I also really loved Persephone, so she got to stay. For now. I have not forgotten you Orchid! You're still a baby and I love you!

Poor Dropsy the Goldfish fell out of favor once I sketched Hook the Salmon. Maybe someday Dropsy! But I think the appeal might be too limited, and it honestly might have been too sad a story. Hook's story is based on zombie salmon and he turned out to be too popular with me and my friends. Both Dropsy and Hook have really unique faces! I ended up ditching the fish bone eye shine on Hook to make the eyes applique friendly since they cover such a huge portion of the face. Maybe if there is ever another fish I can bring it back? His colors were also brightened up.

Hugs was one I really wanted to do so I kept picking at him even when the initial sketches weren't satisfying, but he's a concept where I came up with the design first and tacked on the dead phrase theme second. I think it unfortunately shows since he doesn't have as many little details, but he's too cute for me to be too upset. Once I got something down I liked I REALLY liked it and he stayed pretty solid. I'm sure some will call it blasphemy to make a snake with legs, but how else is he gonna wear a cute lil shirt like his buddies? He'd be an out of place unfashionable tube!

Daisy has a comedy/tragedy kind of thing going on, and while playing dead felt kind of obvious for a possum I think she turned out cute. She is one of the early concepts that got a lot of little details slipped in because I had a stronger sense of what I wanted to do with her. A lot of those stuck around, but some of the bigger changes were just toning things down. She got an eye back too. So far she's the only design with hanging guts. Her nose was drawn with the idea of custom molded plastic at first.

Roger was a struggle. I wanted something less obvious than a crow named Murder or a vulture of some sort. Not that those would have been bad ideas, but they're very associated with being around dead things and not with being dead themselves. I decided to choose birds that we treat poorly. All the chicken ideas upset me too much, so I chose pigeons. Instead of glorifying how people treat them like vermin to exterminate I based him on homing and racing pigeons. Those birds are desperate to get home, and many die before they reach their lofts. In the end I took a lot of inspiration from Cher Ami, a poor soul who delivered his message successfully despite being shot. A bleeding heart dove ended up being a more interesting visual and thematic choice but the story stuck.

Persephone is one of those ideas where the first time you sketch it you're like yep, no notes, moving on. Cordyceps crown on a purple ant and make them huggable, got it. I think the only change I even made during her initial sketch was I originally gave her more accurate beady lil eyes but that just wasn't going to work with the other plush. I DID brighten her purple so matching fabric colors for her would be easier. Purple is not a fun color to match for in the fabric I want to use for these. 

Switchblade ended up based on a D&D character of mine, but hopefully loosely enough that it doesn't seem like I'm just trying to shoehorn an OC in to a plush line. The schrodinger's cat idea came first and I was originally going to maybe go for some spaghetti western villain, but while I pursued the outlaw thing more I realized I was just making the same guy twice. My tabaxi rogue Scarlet is also a partially undead crime boy where his whole thing is not having a clear answer on what he is. So I took his cutest trait (his giant idiot ears,) stole his eyes' color scheme, then went from there. The final has detail changes from the sketch to make it more applique friendly.

Bullseye & Crosshair ended up getting a LOT of changes to make them more production friendly. That is an important consideration to make for the fabric I am wanting to work with. Despite that I think they are still very cute. My favorite breeds of cow aren't spotted anyway. While Gemini was an inspiration at the starting point I didn't try to copy their markings or make it the actual animal in any way. They still turned out to be the highest production cost plush, but that's not really surprising.

I had to make a completed sheet for at least 1 design that I could use to pick a manufacturer for handling the project. I selected Switchblade as the try out character. He's got some challenging embroidery and applique, but he also has a very basic body shape, so I would learn a lot about how that particular manufacturer would handle the entire line based on the decisions they made with him. It also let me see if they were going to follow a more complex design sheet. Sometimes when there's too much information they get pick-and-choose-y about what they actually follow, and I can't have that for something with this level of detail.

Here is what a mostly complete reference sheet looks like! The text isn't all there since it's overwhelming, technical, and I don't want it to set any false expectations for folks reading this moving forward. I call this the quick guide. All my designs end up coming with more material other than the missing text, like vectors for embroidery and applique, close up drawings of parts, pantones and fabric swatch numbers, photo collages of techniques used on previous plush of mine that I want to replicate, etc. Sometimes the sheets I send to different manufacturers actually have altered drawings based on how I've had them translate certain shapes in the past, which is the case with the side view of the legs here. I knew if I didn't draw them undeniably chunky from that angle they would have been made as flat as his tail.

Off he went to prototyping! It wasn't too long before the first ones came back. It was so fast (about a week) because this is the absolute roughest of drafts that some designers skip over entirely. I call it the shape test, since there doesn't seem to be an industry standard term for it that has made it past the language barrier for me yet.

The desired material is an extremely soft, long furred synthetic fiber fabric that is sometimes called "rabbit velvet," "synthetic rabbit," "luxe cuddle," "bunny minky," etc. That fabric makes for a great plush to cuddle!! But it is a miserable sewing experience. It is SO SLIPPERY. So test sewing the shapes in an easier-to-handle material can help knock out the most extreme problems without having to wrestle the beast that is slipping fabric repeatedly. It also shortens the span of time between iterations. There is a weakness to this: longer material adds bulk, so if the shape is perfect in short material it will probably be too chunky in a more furry material.

There were some changes to make, of course. There almost always is! Pretty much all the desired changes were to make sure he still looked good with a full fur coat, other than trying to make sure his size was correct. He seemed too small. After that I approved some embroidery files before they were used, and the process moved forward.

He turned out looking REALLY good for a first final material draft! But you can see how some of the challenges of this material remained. For example, in profile the area of embroidery for the nose makes it look concave. That is fine for a skull nose for him, but something that must be carefully considered for all the other designs. He also has toes defined by something called "thread sculpting," but the fur actually hides the toes entirely. His eyes were also just too small. But if they're made larger, and the thread sculpting is better defined we'll get this handsome lad:

It doesn't exactly match my drawing, but it never really does. I draw the ideal outcome, not the only acceptable one! Compromises must be made for production, and this result is still so cute!! There was 1 other glaring issue though. These are called Deadweights because they are meant to be weighted and unfortunately his limbs were not hanging in a way where they seem to have any weight at all. So I asked for that to be double checked, and ended up getting a pic of cat being more of a downward dog.

I can't make out what unit that is in, but I think it is grams. If that's the case he certainly wasn't weighted at under a lb. despite his 18 inch height. If it is 42.7 oz, he'd've been heavy enough that he's weighted but we'd have to add some more for the proper heavy dangle in the limbs. This was going to be an important thing to figure out, because if the weight isn't significant enough to justify the name there might need to be some put in the bottom of the plush as well, increasing cost. 

I also got photos of the bottom of his feet. The radioactive sign turned out fine! It wasn't applique, but it has so many straight lines I worried that it might increase the b-grade rate significantly. The poison symbol cat skull needed some color change, so I sent back an update for that.

At this point progress had been very good, and I was pretty confident that Switchblade would be completed in two or three more drafts at max. I was impressed with this manufacturer's process since they are one of the newer folks I'm working with. This isn't our first project together but it is our first of this sort. So I ended up submitting the rest of the designs to get work on them underway! Here are the quick reference sheets without text in various states of completion:

Bullseye & Crosshair remained the most complicated, to the point that this isn't even the whole sheet, I had to do multiple. The shape of the head had to be very specifically communicated with nothing left up to the imagination which meant showing it from a lot of different angles. It would be interesting to see how Hook's body turns out. Persephone and Hugs tied for "most butt." Roger and Daisy looked simple, but I imagined Roger's wing feathers and eye applique would present possible issues. The skulls on Daisy's ears and the zig-zag on her tail might need changed too.

Not too much time later a couple more prototypes came in. Starting with Daisy the Possum, who is unfortunately not as close to the mark as Switchblade right out of the gate. Poor Daisy ends up needing a ton of changes. Her hanging guts look so bad that I decide to cut them for now. Perhaps we can tackle them once the rest of the plush is looking better, but usually when something is that far off the mark it is a bit gangrenous and better chopped off the project entirely. Other requested changes ranged from longer arms and narrower body to adjusted hair shapes and color adjustments. It's a rough start, but still an overall good foundation.

The next day Roger the Dove arrives, and WOW! He is pretty dang close!! Longer feathers, the addition of a missing feather shape, and more definition to the shape of the ceres are all I ended up asking for. His tail is fairly different, but all these gentle curves ending in harshly pinched corners is a lot to ask for and I'm happy with the production-friendly compromise they made. The challenge with him is going to be the applique. I'm really excited for him after getting this, especially the color scheme!

I got a 3rd iteration of Switchblade. He was SO CLOSE to 100% but oddly enough some of the things that were wrong in the new iteration were correct in the last one and had no adjustments requested, which is always frustrating.

But after just 1 more round of tiny updates Switchblade is done, and he looks perfect! Once he shipped to me and I got to hold the prototype in my hands I got a lot more excited. He's about 2lbs total with weighted filling in his limbs and tail only, and I finally get to test some things like seeing if he can sit on a shelf or how well he fits on a lap when drawing at a desk. I fell in love with him, can't lie. He's wiggly and floppy and has just enough weight to feel present and hold himself upright or in place but not enough that you risk uncomfortable pressure on any one point since it is all distributed. I try not to let our prototypes live on the bed because they're very precious to me as memories, but Switchblade ended up there anyway, a rare privilege he shared with our first giant werewolf.

More initial drafts came in. First Hugs the Python, who I was immediately very torn on. His weird chipmunk head shape is not accurate to the art, but I found it extremely charming. Did I actually want to edit it...? I went with yes for now, thinking I could reverse it in the future if necessary for something like fitting his eye embroidery. The biggest edit was a change to his tail though. Having a wider attachment point limits how floppy it can be, but as it is it simply looks too flat.

And then I got photos of the critters I thought would be last: Bullseye and Crosshair the Conjoined Calves! It is a good start. The horns are a bit flat, the ears are welded to the head, the face patch isn't reading as a heart and I think the nose and belly patch will have to be changed to minky, but it is a really solid start. We are now fully encountering the limitations of color variety in this material though. Do I make peace with darker brown and white instead of cream or do I roll the dice on a color match again? I decided getting more accurate colors was worth a go. There had to be better available.

Then at long last, Persephone the Ant and Hook the Salmon are made and sent at the same time. For Persephone we're again discovering the limitations of color availability, and her mouth is looking awkward. She is also missing a set of limbs. Hook is just a test color much like Hugs, but his shapes are actually really good! He is missing some fins though.

Color changes were tentatively requested, embroidery file edits were made and approved, and it was back to an extended silence once again. 

Now that first drafts were complete (at varying stages of success) everything entered the difficult stage of simply waiting for updates. At this point it is already late September, which made me very nervous. I had started this process in May. They had been going so fast with Switchblade in the first few rounds... what happened? Are we going to even have a second complete prototype by December? Pushing the project back continued to be a concern. Then after a meeting with Backerkit's marketing team I got one last reason to change the launch time, and so it was decided. As much as I love these weirdos they were going to have to wait for their time in 2026. Which is just as well- with the downturn in sales I was experiencing at conventions and on my online shops it became very clear that it was a bad time to be jumping in to an expensive project. Just in time for 2 more drafts to appear in early November! Oh well. I took the pressure off the designers that I had put on them for a December finish line now that the launch had been moved back significantly. I had a lot less worry about having them by a year after the process started.

Daisy and Roger were the next embroidered additions! For Daisy, the embroidery needed some tweaks. No black in the ears, and the mouth ends awkwardly in a way that looks fine from the front but not the side. Luckily her snout is long enough that the switch to an embroidered nose wasn't awful even with the fur. Also look at that chonky tail! Taking off the loops of intestines turned out to be a fine move. The most important thing: she looks like she will be nice to hug.

Roger, however, turned out painfully cute. The ceres are maybe a little too big but I actually think they're entirely too adorable (especially from the front) to change. And I mean... just LOOK AT THIS CREATURE!!! His wings aren't super floppy because they're so chunky, but he also looks like he is asking for a hug! I really hope people will like him. I'm a bit biased towards birds but he just might turn out to be my favorite.

A few weeks later Hook the Salmon had photos come in, and he is absolutely goofy. Entirely in a charming way thankfully! This take at his draft was perfect and was quickly approved. One thing is for sure, he is going to be a nightmare to try and take half-decent photos of. His color palette is so fun!

Hugs the Python was next! The pale yellow on his limbs need to be swapped to white to increase the contrast (an edit which has been applied to the pictures below,) and he is for some reason missing both his tongue and his pink neck. He looks cute otherwise! It also quickly became apparent that Hugs was undoubtedly going to be the largest. This prototype arrived with just 2 days to go before December, so moving the campaign to another time turned out to be the right call after all.

The changes for Hugs were tackled quickly. We're ditching the tongue, the designed shapes are not simple enough to do a hand cut for, and the simplified shape looks a bit too cheap for my taste. I think he looks plenty python-like even without a forked tongue to try and communicate that. These changes turned out to be very minor overall though, making it extremely likely that the next iteration will be the last.

Daisy's changes are done and she's good to go! She's all greens and pastels, no more black. By this point it is already almost 2 weeks in to December, and we have 4 complete, 1 nearly complete, and 2 I haven't seen a full prototype for. I've seen embroidery files for Persephone and Bullseye + Crosshair so they are on the way, but it is likely that at least the calves will take several iterations. They're complicated shapes after all!

Things were starting to pick up steam after this point since there were so few left to do anything major to! The designers were also pushing to clear projects out, since a big shut down for the Lunar New Year is starting to loom large on the horizon. Persephone finally got an embroidered prototype! The issue with poor purple color choices continued to be a problem. Sure, this purple is darker, but it leans too red. Her other purples all lean blue.

I haven't worked with this manufacturer enough to have their swatch books on hand, which would usually prevent all this color mismatching. Having swatch books is super useful for saving time on things like this! But due to an ever-increasing number of people doing one-and-done design prototypes without ever placing a real bulk order most have started treating the usually complimentary booklets a lot more dearly since they are not an inexpensive asset to keep throwing in to the void- free swatch books are meant to be an investment in future business. Luckily for me I've got a long history with other manufacturers, and sometimes different designers have similar textile sources, so there is some overlap in the books. With a little cross referencing we were able to narrow down what matches we have in one of my swatch books and I picked a new color to use instead of purple- a darker blueish grey.

It looks like butt in artificial light on my phone camera, but seeing it in person with swatches of her current colors on hand I knew this would look good for sure. Nothing really beats having the actual fabric to color compare to even when there's always a risk of colors being slightly different from batch to batch.

Other than the colors, her eyes are way too small, which has been kind of a consistent thing. I suppose the big expressive eyes on these designs is a little beyond the pale even for most other teddies in this size range, whoops. It does get tricky to place them around all the fabric darts but luckily fixing Persephone's eyes should be possible without much fuss.

A little while later and I'm in for a treat! Just in time for the end of the year the first embroidered prototype of Bullseye and Crosshair is done, and it becomes apparent why it took so long. They were working hard on making them perfect! I only ended up wanting to change the unconjoined eye sizes (perpetually undersized eye struck again) and moving one of the three horns to a different position. The ears still have that odd attached look, but they're now in a position that looks cuter than they might if gravity had more of a chance to work on them. The visible skin is now a proper minky instead of fuzzy. Most importantly the marking is a heart and the colors are much, much better!

They're so cute! I don't want to call any shots since I know we're unlocking 1 design at a time, but I think if we do manage to reach the stretch goals for Bullseye and Crosshair they'll be one of the standouts. It figures that the very first Deadweights ever sketched would be the last one to get an embroidered prototype but they're well worth the wait. Would it be in poor taste to say I'm over the moon about this one? Here's the minimal proposed changes I gave:

We're about to head in to 2026 when all this was going on, and the count is now 4 completed, 3 very nearly done with minimal changes requested. Either all of this will suddenly get rush-done in January before the shut down or I probably won't be seeing these cuties in their new skin until spring. I can make peace with that since the new launch date is in September. They'd really worried me with how long it took to get to this point, but I think I'd worried them by ordering so much prototyping of complex designs without much history with their company specifically. Ultimately this taking pretty much a whole year is ok. We both had good reasons for making the choices we did, and Deadweights is just one of very many balls I'm having to keep in the air, so it isn't like I was pressed for things to do in the meantime. 

My guess about there being a push to have them done before LNY turned out to be correct, and the next prototypes turned out to be the finals. While there was a big lapse between iterations, 3 or so prototypes to hit a final turned out to be pretty consistent for all of them, and that really isn't bad- especially considering how detailed and strangely shaped some of these are! All of the prototypes arrived to my home, were given some nice hugs, and then were promptly stored away. They needed to be kept in shape for photographs when the weather had warmed back up, and I knew if they stayed out I would've ended up messing them up just carting them around or cuddling with them, because they were very satisfying to hold.

Which.. I did end up pulling Hook out to hug anyway. His little back hump is a great chin rest if he's in your lap while you're at the computer or something. Especially if you're doing a disaster bisexual kind of sit like I tend to since my spine is crunched up like a stomped drink can. It made me want to design some stuff in the future specifically for sitting cuddles instead of laying or standing ones, but that's for the future!

Now I just have to wait until it is finally time to launch... which, since I'll be launching with a partner, turns out to be a long ways off. During this time, I've run 2 other campaigns, and the economy has managed to go from bad to worse. I had enough time to try and do something to include folks who were unlikely to be able to afford a full size Deadweight now who might've been following the project since the beginning. In those 2 campaigns I'd run I'd seen how badly it ruined things for folks who'd been genuinely excited, and I hate being a source of disappointment for anyone- the biggest reason I do plush for a living is because of the happiness it brings to people. But plush are just expensive things to make in general, especially since I am a stickler for things being done legally and ethically, and not producing at unreasonable volumes.

The solution ended up being 4.5in tall plush that had super extra simple and dumpy looks. And since they have X eyes on the full size teddies, might as well do super cute button eyes right? All it took was me sketching one weird little dumpling and all of a sudden I'd been up almost 48 hours and had the full set designed and submitted for prototyping.

These much smaller, much simpler plush were sent to a manufacturer I have a more established relationship with. They are not my go-to folks for big or very detailed things, but they excel at small and simpler. They did not disappoint! Things went so quickly I felt almost silly. Within just a couple of weeks I had the first drafts, and most of them were nearly perfect. The only one in need of major changes turned out to be Bullseye and Crosshair, who hadn't been given a true snout on either face and was far too dark a brown. Other than that, Roger's eyes needed to be moved, and Hugs had some embroidery he didn't need, and that was it. 

And after changes for Bullseye and Crosshair:

With the final drafts of the Bantam Burials underway, the line was truly complete! It took many months of development, and it was not always easy to just stick to the original vision. So now you've seen a truncated version of what it is like to design and develop a line of plush! There's a lot more to this kind of business as a whole. Designing a plush is only part of the battle, but luckily once a design is done it is done.

I hope you will consider helping out with bringing these plushies to folks who will love them once we go live in September! We'll be launching early that month alongside Fangy Friends 2 as a partner campaign! Keep an eye on this page to learn about exclusive rewards in the coming weeks, including how to get a free Bantam Burials with your campaign rewards. Until then I'm focusing on other campaigns that are in, or will be entering, fulfillment! I hope this was interesting for y'all!