Arts
Finding a home for her peculiar plushies
Meet Afra Mizaja, a 24-year-old medical student at the Kotelawela Defence University who started making plushies just two months ago and has just launched the ‘Mizaja Home for Peculiar Plushies’.
Making stuffed toys may seem a curious hobby for a busy medical student but the creative process helps Afra destress. Being a medical student sometimes consumes your life – you lose sight of all other things she feels. “You need something on the side to help you cope with the stress of what you are doing on a daily basis.”
She started making plushies when she discovered plushie patterns on the internet and tried to make them herself. She then would give them to her friends and family as gifts and all whom she gifted them to urged her to start a small business. Setting up Mizaja Home for Peculiar Plushies, Afra has been pleasantly surprised at the response she has got.
After getting a feel of what making them entailed, Afra began to create her own plushies without any patterns. First making a sketch of the plushie she has in mind, she sketches it out to scale and starts sewing the plushie with rough fabric. Once she is satisfied with how it is turning out, she starts making it with the proper fabric. It takes a lot of work and dedication to make a plushie without a pattern but once she has made it, she can then turn out more.
A great fan of video games, her favourites being Skyrim, Witcher 3 and League of Legends, Afra has designed video game items such as health, love and poison potions.
Another interesting theme she has created is the candy whale line which emanated from her love of candy and sweets.With names such as cherry whale, blueberry whale, liquorice whale, bubble-gum whale,cotton candy whale,lime whale, and lemon whale, these cute soft toys melt your heart and make your mouth water with the creative names Afra has come up with.
Afra refers to her plushies as being adopted instead of being sold. “When you make something with love and a lot of thought and time, you don’t want to just sell it. Instead giving it to a new home, having someone adopt what you make, fills you with more happiness,”says Afra. Her idea of people adopting her plushies goes with the name of her business, ‘Mizaja Home for Peculiar Plushies’.
Afra in general loves to create and handmakes all of her cosplays. The process of making plushies is similar to that. When making cosplays sometimes the blueprints are not available, and she has to improvise and innovate, and she does the same thing with plushies as well. When Afra became interested in cosplaying her mother taught her to sew, and that is the foundation on which she started creating her plushies.
Afra is also trying to improve her plushie making skills by using different fabrics, testing them out and finding the best.
“It is important to have something steady as well as a hobby on the side and if you provide something that others enjoy then it is worth taking the risk of starting your own small business,” says this motivated young medical student.
Visit Afra’s instagram (https://www.instagram.com/mizajas_home_peculiar_plushies/) or Facebook page
(https://www.facebook.com/pg/mizajashomepeculiarplushies/about/)
Adorable plushies with mouth-watering names: The candy whale line. Pix by Priyantha Wickramaarachchi