Before all the wedding and honeymoon and 30-turning events of this summer, my husband – who’d gone back to school to complete his BA after a break of several years – graduated. Because why not do everything in one summer?

This was an occasion we felt needed to be adequately marked with celebration. My father-in-law and his wife graciously hosted a lovely garden party to mark the special event, and there was food and drink and, of course, gifts. I wanted to give Jeremy something very special, something I’d made. And what do you give a grown up man to mark the occasion of a grown-up accomplishment? A stuffed animal!

A badass stuffed animal.

Jeremy’s been playing Highlander (a popular local MtG format) a lot, and has an elf deck whose main win condition is getting Craterhoof Behemoth on the board. So I decided to make him a (much miniaturized) Craterhoof plush. So that he can do THIS.

And just to make this guy even more special, he appears in the most recent episode of LoadingReadyRun’s Friday Nights! Check that out here.

This fellow took a lot of work to construct, particularly a lot of stabbing (read: needle felting). Here are some of the details and process pictures.

After pattern drafting and initial pieces construction, the Craterhoof was a sad and empty shell:

The shell obviously needed stuffing. But this plushie needed something special to fill it out. A while ago I did a Rainbow Dash plush commission, and on the first try the body just wasn’t quite right. So I ended up making a second body, and wasn’t sure what to do with the first one, until… I realized that a pony would make a very tasty Craterhoof snack! It became part of the stuffing:

Once the basic form was made, it was time to deal with the whole issue of the Craterhoof lacking a jaw. That was made of separate pieces of felt all stacked up and needle felted together, then sewn into place.

And then I had to make the line of that jaw flow smoothly into the rest of the body. Looking carefully at the card, I noticed the Craterhoof has flaps of wrinkly skin on the underside of his jaw/neck area. I recreated these by laying down a pad of quilt batting and loosely needle felting it into place

followed by needle felting a piece of matching gray felt overtop of the quilt batting

and then I needle felted wrinkle lines into that whole area, blending in the edges of the new, overlaying felt piece:

After that came spots. Much like with the Garruk’s Companion plush, I needle felted the spots into place so they’d be secure and also look like an organic part of the creature – no stitch lines around the edges. Same thing for the toes.

I  needle felted layers of cream felt to create his horns/tusks, needle felted a little indent where each of those would go, and hand sewed them in place.

And of course gave him eyes. You can’t see them from the on-the-ground angle in the card art, but they must be there. Turns out, Craterhoof Behemoth looks a little derpy from above. But if you still look terrifying from below and that’s the only way your enemies ever see you, you’re all good.

And angry eyelids always help:

The spikes along his back, sides and face caused me some pondering, but in the end I decided a layer of card stock sewn between two pieces of felt should do the trick. And it did.

I needle felted a sort of little trough on the Craterhoof where each spike was to go, then sewed them all into their spots by hand.

Finally, he got a tail (again, it’s not visible on the card art, but we speculated there was a tail back there, to swat away pesky Shivan Dragons and such):

and a special mark on the bottom of his back right leg (where no one would notice it and it wouldn’t detract from his ferocious demeanor).

And with that, he was ready to go destroy some shit! Tromp tromp TROMP!

Nibble nibble nibble.