How to Sew a Keepsake Memory Bear | Beginner Plush Tutorial (+ Printable Pattern!) Keepsake Memorial

Today I'm going to show you how to sew a really easy memory bear plush. You can make this out of about a half a yard of fabric or you can use an old baby blanket or even loved one's clothing to make this a memory keepsake. The bear that I'm making here in this tutorial is for my little girl. She turned four this weekend and she absolutely loved it. She also loved that the fabric crown that I made for her birthday fits her bear. This comes in six different patterns and they are so quick and easy to make. I will link that below as well if you want to make that for your bear too. The link below in the description box will bring you to the pattern pieces that you can download and print at home and go ahead and sew along with me. This is geared towards beginners so my video is a little bit longer because I want to show even beginner sewers that yes you can make stuff like this too. I have the pattern pieces organized into three different sections and I also have some labeling on three of the pattern pieces that if you want to have different fabric colors you can use these three pattern pieces for contrasting fabric. The other three sections are your head, the back of your bear, and your front of the bear. Go ahead and keep these organized and stacked together so that way at all times you know where your pieces are and what part of your bear you're sewing. Here's what you're going to need. If you're not using loved one's clothing, a t-shirt, or baby blanket, go ahead and get a half yard of fabric. If you have a directional print you're going to need two-thirds yard. I'm using roseblood fleece. Fleece, flannel, things like that are great to use for this but you can also use any other kind of cotton fabric or whatever you would like to. This is my contrasting fabric. It's white satin. You'll need about a half a bag of polyfill stuffing or an old pillow you're not using anymore that you can take that stuffing material to use. I use a chopstick in my everyday sewing to smoothen out my seams and these are animal safety eyes. This pack costs about eight or nine dollars on Amazon and you can make tons of stuffed animals. Just be careful with those little ones. They are a safety hazard. You can also hand embroider your eyes and face features as well if you want. Here are my pattern pieces printed and laid out on my fabric. I have my fabric folded with the pretty sides together and here's my fold along the right side. If you see a pattern piece that ever says cut on the fold it means you lay that part of the pattern piece on the fold of your fabric. Pin or clip it down and then trace around that pattern piece while it's still in the fold and then when you go to cut that pattern piece out of your fabric you're not going to unfold the fabric. Keep it folded while you cut. Now if you have a directional fabric, mine is not directional meaning I can place my pattern pieces any direction I want to and it'll look exactly the same. This is a directional fabric. You can see it goes up and down so I wouldn't want to put the pattern pieces you know to the side or angled because then my fabric would not look you know the right direction. So in that case you're going to need two-thirds of a yard of fabric so that way the front of your bear and everything can fit nicely up and down. I don't have a directional fabric so I only need half a yard and I'm going to go ahead and trace around all of my pattern pieces and cut them out. Make sure that you are mindful of which ones you have to cut one or which ones you have to cut two and throughout this whole project we're going to stay organized by keeping the sections of our pattern pieces stacked together. The back of the bear, the front of the bear, and the head of the bear and they are also color coded so that way if you print in color it'll be easier for you to know what you're working with. We're going to start sewing the head of the bear. Grab your pattern pieces one of five and two of five of the head of the bear. You cut two mirrored out of this fabric here on the right. This is your middle panel and this is your mirrored fabric. What that means is you just have the fabric right sides together when you trace that pattern piece onto your fabric and you cut them out while they're still stacked so that way they mirror each other. So I'm going to get that middle panel piece and line up the two raw edges just like I'm doing here and then I'm going to sew a straight line down that right side where I'm clipping here using a one-fourth inch seam allowance. Now let's go ahead and open this seam up and we're going to attach the other side of our head piece right here to this raw edge right here and again sew with a one-fourth inch seam allowance. And here's what it looks like once you have it all opened up. This is going to be the top part of your head and now we're going to attach our ears. So we're going to first sew them together. You have four that you cut out and I'm going to use a contrasting fabric for the front of my ears and just my rosebud fleece for the back. Go ahead and lay them with the right sides together. The pretty sides of the fabric should be kissing. Pin or clip all the way around except for not on the bottom and then you're just going to sew using a one-fourth inch seam allowance all the way around that top curve leaving the bottom of both of your ears open. If you don't have much experience sewing with curves, what you're going to do is sew slowly. Rotate your fabric without pushing or pulling it and you can lift your presser foot and move your fabric a little bit if you need to to go around those curves. When you do that, make sure the needle is all the way in your fabric before you lift that presser foot to move it. Now here are both of my ears sewn. If you have pinking shears, you're going to want to cut down your seam allowance with those. Rosebud fleece doesn't cut well with pinking shears so I'm just going to cut small slits going all the way up to my stitch line being careful not to cut through my stitch line so that way when we flip this right side out our fabric will lay with that curve and it won't pucker up. Go ahead and press it flat with your iron if you want to and make sure all your your seams on the inside are nice and smooth. Now we're going to get those ears and we're going to place them to the left and right of that middle panel seam that we connected these two head pieces to right there at the top. So go ahead and get one ear piece with the raw edges at the top and the right side of your fabric facing down lay it right to the left side of that seam at the top. Do the same thing and lay it to the right of the seam at the top on the other side and you're just going to do a basting stitch here really close to the edge just sew it to hold it in place and don't worry about how it looks this won't show on your finished bear. So here's what mine looks sewn and here you can see I stayed right close to the edge again it's just a placeholder to keep it in place. The next thing that we're going to do is we are going to add pattern piece head three of five. This is going to be your nose and your mouth and you want to be careful about the direction of this because as you can see there is one top curve and there's two humps at the bottom. The two humps should be at the bottom with the one big curve at the top. Now we're going to lay this so that your fabric is wrong sides up and we're going to match up the first edge with the side of the head of the bear and do it the same way on the second side. Then you're just going to pin or clip this in place just like this and we're going to go and sew it using a 1 4 inch seam allowance and I'll show you how. Here's the bear with the mouth and the nose sewn on you'll see how that's created in just a few minutes. The next thing that we're going to do is you see those little triangles at the bottom left and right hand side of your bear head those are called notches. Anytime you see those you're going to fold those together right sides together just like this and then you're going to make a straight line sewing those notch pieces together. You do this so that it rounds an area of the fabric so this notch and this notch will help round the fabric at the bottom of your bear head so that it's more rounded and congruent with an actual head shape. I just use a 1 4 inch seam allowance and sewn right here quick and easy about a 1 4 of an inch. Now let's get that bear head and fold it in half with the right sides of your fabric together. When you fold it like this you can kind of see how that mouthpiece is going to create the nose the mouth and bottom of the head is going to be the neck. You're just going to go from the nose all the way down to the bottom of fabric using a 1 4 inch seam allowance. I have already done that and you can see I went straight down just a little curve and then we can flip this right side out and you can see this bear face finally take shape. Now let's get pattern piece head 505. This is the back of the bear's head just like before those triangles are notches in your fabric that we are going to sew together by folding this in half and using a 1 4 inch seam allowance to sew those notches. If you want to sew it more at a curve instead of a straight line it will make it look a little bit nicer I feel like on cotton fabrics but you can do it just like this as well. So once you open that up you can see how that made your back of the bear head more rounded instead of flat. Now let's sew the front of the bear head and the back of the bear head together. With the front of the bear head down make sure your ears are down and let's place these two pieces of fabric with the right sides together. The pretty sides of the fabric should be kissing. Then you are going to take this to your sewing machine and sew all the way around the top of the head leaving the neck area open. You can use a 1 4 of an inch seam allowance or a 3 8 of an inch it's totally fine whichever one you use for this project as long as you don't use more than that. Here is mine sewn. If you are using a cotton fabric or a flannel go ahead and use your pinking shears and cut all the way around your bear head so that way it lays nicely when you flip it right side out otherwise your fabric will pucker and it won't look like a big curve. If you don't have pinking shears I just use scissors going right up to my stitches all the way around the bear head but making sure not to clip through my stitches. Just like I mentioned before this is where we basted those ears in place they will not show on your bear head when you're all finished. Make sure you put your hand or a chopstick inside of your bear head and smoothen out all the seams on the nose and the head. So I'm going to add safety eyes. I'm going to very briefly show you how to do this. It is not as intimidating as you would think. This is my nose I have two eyes and I have three of the plastic safety backs. This green thing with the handle is an awl. It's what you use to poke a hole through a fabric. So I'm just going to get that awl and I'm going to poke a hole right to the left of that middle panel and to the right of the middle panel where the seam meets the nose just right there in those corners. I'm going to poke a hole with my awl and then I'm going to place the safety eye and the nose they're all done the same way right through the top of that hole and then I'm going to go inside the bear head and place the safety backing on it. It just snaps right into place it is super easy and that's literally all there is to adding safety eyes and noses or any other kind of safety things to your sewing projects. The nose placement is just top mid center of where you sew that little nose and mouth area. I like to do it right there on the tip at the top. Now get your front of bear fabric and pattern pieces the the number one pattern. I'm showing you on a different fabric because this is going to be a memory keepsake and I want to show somebody else who's using a shirt how to add the buttons on the front. So what you're going to do is get your pattern piece and where you were supposed to have cut or used a box cutter to open up that dashed line on the pattern piece trace it right onto your fabric. Make sure you're doing this on the back of your fabric the wrong side and when you're doing that you can also see here that there's some little markings on your pattern piece make tiny marks on each one of your fabric pieces right where those are. These are sewing guides. This is going to tell you where to attach the other parts of fabric and where to stop sewing. I'll explain that later. Now you're going to get both of your fabric pieces and right where you just drew this fold the fabric down right on that bottom line. You can pin or clip it on the sides if you need to but we're actually going to sew right on this curve on both parts because this is the leg of the front of your bear and this is going to help make the foot of your bear a lot easier. We're just going to sew right above where we marked that line so that way we don't see it if you have a fabric that is kind of see-through. So if you're sewing a curve you just want to start right above the the fabric line that we just drew that pattern piece on and just sew slowly and move your fabric as you need to around that curve. This is what it looks like. You should have done this on both of your bear body pieces and then if we flip it right side up pretty side facing up you fold that down and just make a little crease. This is going to end up being the top of your bear's foot. Now we want to lay these two fabric pieces with the right sides together and we're going to sew the front of the bear belly. So we're going to start at the top and using a one fourth or three eighths of an inch seam allowance whatever you're using for this project sew all the way around this bear curve. Now you're going to stop at that marking that we made on your pattern piece to your fabric just a few minutes ago this one right here because we're just sewing the belly of this bear. Especially if you are using this kind of fabric a cotton a flannel make sure you use your pinking shears along that seam line or cut little slits in your fabric so that this fabric rounds nicely. Doing it at the curve makes this so that the belly will pucker out a little bit like a typical bear would. Now if you're using this as a memory bear and you want to add the buttons of your shirt just cut those buttons off of the shirt you don't have any seams showing normally and then you're just going to place it along the middle top seam of the front of your bear here line it up and cut it to the length that you want and then you're just going to sew it down on both sides of this button strip. Make sure you're careful when you're sewing because if you have buttons sometimes it's better to use a zipper foot on your sewing machine but you don't have to. As you are sewing this on make sure that you are mindful that it always stays centered with the center seam of the front of your bear and then remember that this front of your bear curves so don't get your fabric caught up like see how I'm opening it up here before I start sewing. Go ahead and do that and then just sew all the way down until you get to the end seam at the bottom. When you get to the end seam at the make sure you don't catch the legs here you're going to actually fold the bottom of your button strip inwards a little bit so that way it doesn't catch the legs of your bear. Now we're going to work with the fabric that I'm already using for the front of my bear and we're going to attach the arms to the front of our bear. You should have cut these two mirrored pieces and that means you just have the fabric with the right side together you traced around that fabric piece and you cut them both out at the same time so that they're mirrored. They should angle upwards when you have them next to the front of your bear and then you're going to line up your bear raw edges of the arm with the front of the body and you're just going to work it around that curve just like I'm doing here and then we're going to sew these on just around those curves on both sides. Now let's start sewing the back of the bear. Get back of bear pieces one of three and three of three. This one is the bottom legs and the butt of your bear and this is the top back of your bear. Lay it just like this and then you're going to flip the top back of your bear downwards so that you meet both fabrics at the curve. With the right sides together go ahead and sew right here at the curve. Here is mine all sewn and don't forget if you're using a different type of fabric to use your pinking shears along any curves the arms the legs the inseam whatever it is or use your scissors to cut small splits in those seams. Now we're going to get this v at the top it's another notch and lay that with the fabric right sides together and just like before that you did on the head you're going to sew this notch together. This is going to make the bear's back a little bit more rounded. Now I normally just sew just straight across but if you round that curve and in that notch instead it'll it'll make it a little bit nicer if you're using a cotton fabric. You can see how sewing that curve and that notch made the back of the bear more rounded. Now let's get the arms for the back of the bear pattern number two of three for the back of your bear. These are also cut too mirrored. You're going to lay them out just like we did for the front of the bear. You want the curves going upwards on the arms and then you're going to place them with the right sides together right up where the arm pieces are on the back of your bear and sew them down. Here is mine sewn. You can see if we open up these arms they will be put together just like it was on the front of your bear. Now let's lay out the front of your bear with the pretty side of the fabric facing you and get the back of your bear and lay them with the right sides together. We're ready to go ahead and assemble the two big pieces of our bear together and I like to start by pinning or clipping right here at the end seam first. I like to do the legs by making sure that those are flat right here where we sewed those curves and they're even. That's where we sewed the curve. Make sure your line here is flat and even on both feet and then we're going to lay the top part down. You can't really see it well here where I made those markings from my pattern pieces but you're going to match up the bottom of these legs here with those marked pieces on the front of your bear pattern pieces. This is going to help you align it correctly so that when we put the sole of these bear's feet on it matches up and the fabric works good. These two pieces don't lay flat together. You have to round it a little bit as you're pinning or clipping and that's so that we can add the puffiness inside of the leg so that it's more rounded. When we're ready to sew you're going to sew the end seam first and then I like to go and do a couple more stitches right at the end seam of the bear because that seems to be where the most pressure is on the seam. Now we're going to line up the seams for the front and back of your bear starting at the top after you've done the sides and line up those arm seams so that it sews nice and evenly and go all the way around your bear with pins or clips. Now we're going to start at the end seam and sew that making sure to go over that end seam at the top a couple of times with your stitches and then starting at the left side of your bear or the right side sew all the way around until you meet the neck. Stop sewing at the neck then you start sewing the other side and go all the way down till you get to the feet and remember we're not going to sew closed these two holes at the bottom where the soles of our bear feet are going to go and you're not going to sew closed your neck at the top. Making sure your fabric is lined up the entire time go ahead and sew this bear together. Here I am going over that end seam just a couple more times so that that seam right there is then going to be weak and bust open later when I have it all stuffed. Here is mine all sewn and remember we did not sew closed the bottom holes or the neck hole. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to trim down my seam allowance and then with pinking shears or your scissors go around and clip all of your curves up to the stitches your arm curves around your hand curves your end seam all of those so that your fabric lays nice and flat and won't pucker when we flip this right side out. Now let's attach the soles of our bear feet we're going to use my contrasting fabric that white satin and with the pretty side facing down we're going to pin or clip these around the holes at the bottom of our bear feet so the pretty sides of our fabric should be together. To do this I quarter off both of the sole bear feet right here by folding it in half and making a super small clip just big enough for me to see it at the top and the bottom then I'm going to match those two together and we're going to make two side clips. This is going to help you match up the sole of the bear feet with the actual bear foot on the pink fabric and it'll help you do it evenly. So now the two side seams are going to be my two markings I'm going to kiss those together and I'm going to make a top slit and a bottom slit then with the fabrics right side together I'm going to go ahead and pin these two or clip these two fabrics together matching up all of my four slits my four corners. Now if you are using a cotton fabric or fabric that doesn't have any stretch to it I would go ahead and make some tiny small splits all the way around your foot before doing this so that way it's easier to lay these two fabrics together in that circular kind of shape. This is going to be the trickiest part to do especially if you didn't line up the top and the back of your bear the front and the back of your bear together properly where your markings were on those pattern pieces. If you didn't do it perfect that's okay just work this fabric together however you can. Now let's take this to the machine and we're going to sew all the way around. If it is not perfect don't stress about it. If you use a little bit more seam allowance than you wanted to just go ahead and try to do the same thing on the other foot so they look nice and even but this won't turn out as bad as you think no matter how you sew this circle down. So I'm going to go ahead and start sewing and then once we're done I'm going to trim down my seam allowance and I'm going to clip small slits all the way around it so that it lays nice and flat. You can also use those pinking shears if you have them and you're not using this type of fabric. Now get your bear body with the front of the bear facing up but the fabric is still wrong side out. Get your bear head and fold it in half. The front of your bear head should also be facing you so that way we line this up inside the body correctly. Just tuck that bear head right inside the neck hole with the fabric right sides kissing so your bear head the fabric should still be right side out and the body should be wrong side out. I start matching up the bear the front seams should line up together and then I'm going to match it up on the side seams and then I'm going to line it up in the back. This just nestles right down into the neck of your bear then you're going to place a couple clips or pins leaving about a two to three inch gap opening right here on the back of the bear. So just make sure you sew all the way around this using about a three-eighths of an inch seam allowance leaving that hole opening in the back. We're going to use that opening to flip this bear right side out when we're all finished. Here's how I like to sew the bear head on. Most sewing machines have this little piece of your arm that you can just remove and then I've created this pattern so that the neck of the bear will fit right over this part of your sewing machine. So I just like to tuck it right in there making sure you don't push your clips or pins in while you're doing it and then starting on the back of your bear neck go ahead and sew using a three-eighths of an inch seam allowance all the way around this bear neck but stopping about two to three inches from where you started to leave that hole opening. Rotate your fabric all the way around as you sew and you're just going to make sure that it's also aligned the neck of the body and the neck of the head. Make sure that fabric always stays aligned together. We are so close to being finished. You can finally start to see it take shape. Here is where I sewed the neck together and here's the hole opening I left on the back of the bear. Go ahead and pull the bear head out of the bear's body. Everything is now wrong side out and then through that hole opening in the back of your bear neck flip this whole bear right side out. I like to start with the head and then I move my way towards the back of the body. Don't pull too hard to where you're going to rip any of your seams but go ahead and flip this right side out. Once you've done that go ahead and use your chopstick, your pin, whatever you're using to smoothen out your seams. Go into the bear's neck and smoothen out all the seams of your bear especially on the foot, the head, and the face and all those things. And here is the bear! How adorable! Now we're going to get your polyfill stuffing and go to the hole in the back of the neck and start stuffing it by the handfuls. I like to start by putting as much as I can into that belly and then I put my hand right inside or my fingers right inside that hole neck opening and then I stuff the legs first. Make sure that you stuff really well around the bottom of the feet so that way it rounds those circular feet really well and then I stuff some more in and then stuff my arms, my belly, and I do my head last. Now we have this whole opening here. You can hand stitch this closed using any stitch you want or I prefer using the blind ladder stitch so that you don't see the stitches. It takes about a minute and if you don't know how to do that that's okay. The link in the description box where the pattern is going to be included in that pattern I'll put a link to another video teaching you how to do that ladder stitch. It's really quick and easy to learn. This bear turned out so cute! I let my who is turning four in a couple days pick out the fabric because this is for her and to go along with it I designed a little toddler backpack that holds the bear on the outside so stay tuned for that pattern or go ahead and look in our shop alohasewingcompany.com for that one as well.