I've hardly posted about it, besides the tapper buttons I made last year, but since early 2016 I've been spending a lot of time playing an arcade game called Killer Queen. It's played by ten people at once, in two teams of five. The social aspect of working with your team to outplay the other one turns a fantastic game into an addictive one. At left and right here are two pictures of one of the key parts of the game: these yellow flowers are scattered around the play area. They start, like at left, full of six berries and often end up like at right, plucked clean. The berries are central to play, being a direct path to one of the win conditions and also the means by which players upgrade themselves to pursue the others.

One of the very dedicated players that I know thanks to this game is pregnant, with her baby due in just a few weeks. A coworker and fellow player had the wonderful idea to give a Killer Queen themed baby gift, and one was a plush berry flower toy. I was excited from the moment I heard the idea. I finished making it, and gifted it, this week. Here's a photo gallery plus some explanation of the build process.

First was gathering materials. There's some yellow felt here for the flower, and some fuzzy pom-poms of just the right color to stand in for the berries. I had to make two orders of these. At first I just got six, because that's how many there are in game. Once I saw them in person though, I realized I'd need to make a pyramid in three dimensions for this to make sense as a physical object.

I found what seemed like a reasonable petal shape and drew it out on the computer, then printed it out on paper for templates. These were traced onto yellow felt which was sewed and trimmed into the final outer shape. It took two tries to get the size right. This worked out great: though I wanted the profile of the smaller size, using the larger size ended up being just the right amount of extra material to wrap around the depth I wanted. So I sewed and cut the outer shape of all four petals. Each was one sheet of felt, cut in half and stitched together into a pocket.

With all four separate petals prepared, the next step was to start sewing them together into one flower. This involved pinning the remaining flaps in place, stitching from the outer corner of two petals down to the middle, and repeating three more times. When done one side of the flower was sewed up, with flaps remaining on the other side.

The plan is to flip the felt flower inside out around a piece of upholstery foam, leaving it stuffed and plush, with the seams hidden inside. This was tested first, and the fit was fine. So the foam came back out and two of the four remaining seams were done by machine, again on what would be the inside. With a smaller open hole left, the flower was stuffed again, leaving just a few loose flaps.

The remaining two seams were stitched by hand. This leaves a raised seam, but they'll be hidden shortly.

I had hardly noticed despite playing the game for over a year, until I looked closely for this project: There's a green structure that holds the berries. I'm choosing to call this the pistil (a discrete organ in the center of a flower capable of receiving pollen and producing a fruit). So I made a simple cone out of green felt and stuffed with a bit more foam, with the intent that it holds up the higher layers of berries without crushing the lower ones. I laid the bottom layer of berries in an arrangement that would mostly cover the raised seams, and leave room for the pistil in the middle. Then stitched the pistil in place, again by hand.

Next I added the vein pattern onto the top of the flowers. I found a reasonable image online, then traced out the main structure and stretched and tweaked it to fit my exact petal shape. I printed this out onto paper and cut out the shape to form a stencil, which was drawn over with a marker. With that done, the first layer of berries were stitched onto the petals in a triangle shape, around the pistil.

All that remained was to attach the final four berries. These went onto the pistil, using its structure to help with the shape. Which did not end up perfect. There was more slack than I hoped for, but I'm still very happy with the final result!