From Blue Jay to Beluga: Creating the Arctic Mini Animals!
This Thursday, December 11th at 1 PM ET, we will be releasing three new tiny animal dollies: the Arctic Minis! We think these minis are an exceptionally cute trio, and we love to imagine them traversing an arctic tundra together in the imaginative play landscape of your living rooms.
Not only are they ethically handmade with love and care, these minis were were also sustainably made entirely from repurposed scraps of organic cotton fleece. Let’s talk about it!
As you may recall, this past April we encountered an unexpected problem with our limited-edition friend Leonard Blue Jay. If you need to catch up on that event, you can read this blog post or watch our YouTube video for the full story. Here is a quick recap of how it all went down:
While conducting a routine quality check in preparation for Leonard’s launch, we discovered – GASP! – his blue fabric was not colorfast. Meaning: the blue dye bled quite dramatically. Cue crisis management mode!
We ultimately came to the decision that the original Leonards could not be sold. We delayed his launch by a couple of months while our artisan partners in Nepal fast-tracked a new batch of blue jays that would not bleed. Leonard finally arrived at Hazel Village in June, and enjoyed a lengthy visit before departing in October for his next project-management adventure.
You can read about how Leonard helped Nicholas build a new wagon in this blog post.
Once we had decided that the original blue jay dolls could not be sold, one big question remained: what would we do with them? If you know Hazel Village, you know that we work hard to practice sustainability in all areas of our small business. We are fortunate to have cultivated a community of other folks who care about this too, so naturally we received a lot of questions and concerns on the matter. We knew we had to come up with a plan!
Did you know that we started making mini animals in the first place to use up leftover fabric scraps? Here's a picture of one of the first mini animals we ever made, back in 2019:
These days we make lots of mini animals, and they have their own dedicated fabric stock. But their scrappy origins gave us the idea to design some new minis which could be made from small panels of white fleece.
We decided an arctic theme would fit the color scheme and work nicely for a December launch date. After sampling a handful of different arctic animals, we decided on the trio we wanted to produce.
The next step was disassembly, which took place here in our Brooklyn workshop. (We won’t be showing much of that process because we wouldn’t want to upset anyone with the particulars, but you can rest assured that it was handled with care.)
Once we had salvaged all the white fabric, we mailed it to our Cambodian partners so that San and her team could work their magic!
The white fabric from 2 blue jay dolls was enough to make 1 full set of arctic minis: a polar bear, a beluga whale, and an ermine.
In the photo below you can see part of the polar bear’s sewing pattern, modeled for cutting out of the salvaged fabric pieces:
And that is the story of how the Arctic Minis came to be!
In case you are curious what became of the other materials, we’ll tell you that all the original stuffing can be reused and many of the workshop elves have already snagged it for their own craft projects. As for the blue fleece, one member of our team has taken it home and plans to use it for a fabric arts project someday. Three cheers for scrappy sustainability! 💙
Leonard says "Ta-da!!!"
We’ll leave you with an exciting sneak peek for next year. We had designed an extra-cozy, snowy-skies inspired pocket sweater to be released with the arctic minis, but unfortunately due to some holiday season delays it couldn't be finished in time. You can look forward to this sweater’s arrival in January!
Thank you for reading, friend! If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at hello@hazelvillage.com. If you enjoyed this blog post, you might also like: