The Little Mermaid: PlushTeam's Fairytale Project

Hi! This is my first post here at The Needle. Thank-you for letting me join in on the fun, too! ♥

The Little Mermaid plush was made for the Fairytale Project with Etsy's Plush Team. We were each partnered up with another member, and had to create a plushie based on our partner's favourite fairytales. My partner (the very talented Area Thrifty One) chose The Little Mermaid as her favourite fairytale. She's a big fan of the Hans Christian Anderson version, and has never seen the Disney version of this story, although she loves a very tragic anime version of the story that premiered in 1979. So, I wanted to try and make my plush capture the emotions of the original fairytale, stay away from the one that is heavily merchandised, but possibly keep her animated looking. After several sketches and hours of work, this is what I came up with:



Area Thrifty One said that she really likes the darkness that fairytales have (I have to agree with her!). She loves The Little Mermaid sculpture in Copenhagen, because she looks so sad as she stares out at sea, since she is not really part of the land, and she is no longer a part of the sea.



At first I thought of giving The Little Mermaid legs and feet, try to show her sadness of being removed from the sea, but then I thought she wouldn't really look like The Little Mermaid upon first glance (and there's no way I could come close to replicating the famous statue in Copenhagen!). So I decided to keep her in mermaid form, but to make her sad, and to definitely stay away from the identifiable Disney colours. ^_~ I added netting on the blue background to symbolize her feeling of being trapped. There are a couple of starfish trapped in the net, too. ^_^


Thanks for looking!
~Emily~
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