The History of Nu

Once upon a time, in the mythical year of 2009, before Fangamer became a legit video game merchandise company and instead sold litigiously suspicious products, I was asked to make them a batch of Nu plushies. I was aiming for a relatively simple design because I was going to painstakingly make them all myself.

This first Nu sample I made was... not good... I still have it, but it's suitable for nothing but a pin cushion. Please stop looking at it.

Please.

But after a few iterations, the Fangamer team and I arrived at a design that everyone was happy with, and I spent the next seven months making a total of 75 Nus in a selection of colors and expressions. Unlike the mass-manufactured plushies of today, each of these were made by me, cut and sewn at home, painted, hand embroidered, and hand appliqued. Often while standing on the long, shaky bus ride to and from university, sewing with one arm wrapped around a pole.

Even though these Nus no longer measure up to my current quality, people really liked them. The first batch of 31 were sold out in six hours, and a few days later a batch of 44 fared equally well. They still pop up on Ebay every once in a while and are snapped up by collectors.

As I became more experienced, the Nu pattern I used would gradually improve each time I made a new batch. I created more developed, 3D feet, which was a little tricky to get the angles of the toes just right. You can see in the photo below that the middle toe sticks up and the Nu looks like they are almost standing on their toes. The legs were attached to the main body by hand sewing. And the arms gained a finger, but I was unhappy with how they were attached to the main body by directly encasing it between the body pieces. It felt kind of suboptimal and interfered with the body shape. Not that it was a good body shape; it needed to be rounder and bigger.

Here's an example where I tried using buttons for eyes. It was a pain in the butt.

Fleece fabric served me well while I was learning to make plushies, but I slowly phased it out in favor of higher quality minky fabric. And I used a few colors before I found a good source of blue that closely resembled Nus. In the example below, the body size had been increased and a seam was added above each leg, which allowed me to finally attach the legs by machine. There was something off about how it points forward though; Nus don't look like Nus unless their feet are just slightly splayed outwards. Other improvements included the arms, which were now joined more naturally to the body. The eyes were machine appliqued pieces of fleece and the mouth was a line of machine sewing.

Once an embroidery machine came into my life, I could embroider the whole face consistently, quickly, and professionally. What a relief! But it meant redesigning the body shape again, because I wanted the line of the mouth to run uninterrupted. The previous design had a seam running right down the center. This problem was solved by basically joining the two front pieces of the body right at the point where the mouth was embroidered. There's still a sewing line directly above and below the mouth, but not on the mouth itself.

And I managed to get the feet to point outwards. The trick was to pivot the small back seam above the legs ever so slightly towards the center back. It's such a tiny change on paper, but ended up being very fussy in practice. This meant that the front seam of the leg no longer matched up with the front seams on the body. That made it hard to attach, as I had to wrangle the tiny tube of each leg into the tiny opening on the body, which, with that tiny open back seam, allowed just enough space for my sewing machine foot to fit inside. It's worth it though!

One thing that has remained consistent is the way I bag out each Nu and attach the hair. All of them are bagged out from an opening at the top of the head, which is stuffed, sewn up, then the hair is hand sewn on top. The current version of Nu has my favorite hair; I was finally able to find a faux fur fabric that's perfect in color, length, and feel. It musses up exactly like how I would imagine a Nu's hair to be like.

I can even do fun styling with the hair!

I think I am currently on my 9th major Nu revision. I added seams at the sides of the body, kinda coming out from the armpits, in order to make the whole body rounder. And I made a few more optimizations, such as shortening the legs, and further refining the mouth.

I think the Nu pattern is finally at a good place. Maybe I'll feel differently about it in the future and want to make more adjustments. In another ten years, my Nus might look very different!