What is Lazy Lamb All About?

Since the Lazy Lamb shop officially launches this week (imagine me quietly screaming 24 hours a day in equal parts anxiety and excitement) I thought maybe I'd take this chance to talk a little bit about who I am and why Lazy Lamb exists.

I started making stuffed animals as a hobby in 2013, and within a few years it became my full-time career.  I've met so many amazing people through plushmaking- this probably shouldn't be surprising, I think by and large people who dedicate their time to painstakingly crafting handmade plush toys are just wonderful humans at their core.

Throughout my creative career, I started wondering how I could support these amazing peers.  One thing I noticed in my own work was that sourcing materials for plushmaking sucks- it's gotten a lot easier over the past decade, for sure, but plush is such a niche craft that we're often stuck buying from specialty shops for entirely different specialties, or ordering fabric from overseas that won't arrive for weeks.  And like, I love fabric shopping, but this isn't the fun kind of fabric shopping... it's just tedious and expensive. 

"Fabric shopping sucks, I should just buy in bulk and start my own shop" is something I kept joking about, and at some point it stopped being a joke and started being me contacting fabric mills for minky samples.  Oops.

My dream is for Lazy Lamb to become a one-stop shop for plush makers, so that our time can be spent on creating instead of on finding the supplies to create with.  All those hours spent sourcing materials add up! 

Now, I won't claim I have everything you'll ever need for plush just yet.  I wish, but we're starting small by necessity.  At first we'll be focusing on our staple collection of safety findings and all-purpose 1mm pile minky.

Why this minky specifically?  Because it's the hardest to source, and yet it's the favorite of so many makers!  Myself included- I always wanted to just replace my whole stock of 3mm minky with the shorter pile length, but it was just too much trouble.  So when I started shopping around for samples, I thought... why not get exactly what I would want to use?  That's become a sort of mantra for me when picking out our stock.  If a fabric or material isn't of a high enough quality that I would use it for my own work, I wouldn't want to sell it to you.

I'm not stopping there, of course!  I already have plans for expanding Lazy Lamb's stock as we gain more support- step one is to expand the color range of our core collection, and beyond that I'm taking notes on every request and "will you have....?" that comes my way.  I can already tell from the response to this endeavor that I am not alone in my desire to actually get the fabric I need, when I need it, and I'm listening intently to what other makers are looking for!  In fact, if there's a particular fabric, color, or finding that you're struggling to source for your plush, please tell me in the comments of this post!  I'm really looking forward to hearing from you and expanding this shop into the plush maker's candy store of my dreams.

Let's make the world softer!