You may recall that one of our June adventure dates was to an art installation called Otherworld. We really enjoyed exploring all of their rooms, but my personal favorite was one with a variety of plush creatures. I am told it is called the Land of Schnoop. Anyway, Otherworld is starting to offer classes, and the first one was a class to design and build an Otherworldly creature! Not only were Keith and I interested in this opportunity, but both kids were excited to sign up, too.
The first step we had to complete was deciding what our creature would look like. They had precut creatures if you really didn’t want to do that part, but they encouraged everyone to try to sketch one out. Everyone has a different creative process, and it turns out that some of our family could sketch out a design and some of us needed to have pieces to play around with to really make design decisions. Both completely valid.
sketches l-r: Charlotte, Autumn, Micah
Our next step was to choose fleece for the main body of our creature and felt for the details. As I said, they had some precut options you could also play around with to get ideas. It was at this point that we had to start sharing 2-3 pairs of scissors for 6 people, and while it wasn’t terrible, it would have been quicker if everyone had their own pair.
Once all your pieces were cut, you had to attach the features to the fleece using sewing, hot glue, or a combination of the two. We did discover that the combination got tricky if you tried to sew through the hot glue – it was pretty tough to get the needles through. They also had some scraps of fake fur if you wanted to accent your creature with some of that. This step went very smoothly with plenty of glue guns and needles for everyone.
The last couple steps were really where the bottleneck of the class happened. It is quickest to use a sewing machine to sew the front and back of the creature together, but Otherworld only had one sewing machine for the 25 or so people in the class. And yes, you could hand sew, but the class time was supposed to be only two hours. And the Emigh family was hungry. So, the kids ended up having their creatures sewn and stuffed while we were there. They sent us home with more than enough stuffing for Keith and me to finish ours as well. I think this was just a result of it being their first class and them not knowing what to expect. I am relatively sure they expected to have more teens and less adults in the class, but everyone really enjoyed it and made amazing creatures. We LOVE ours!
Charlotte 
Keith 
Autumn 
Micah
We would 100% recommend future Otherworld Makes classes and will definitely try to make it to more in the future. A great experience for our family to make things together, and very reasonably priced at $10/person. Thanks Otherworld! If you have been to Otherworld, what was your favorite room? Let us know in the comments!
Adventure. Create. Relate 