- Scrap piece of cardboard. Make sure it’s big enough to make the desired size of monster in one piece. You can use an old shoe box, cereal box, or whatever you can find in the recycle bin. My cardboard came from a frozen lasagna dinner :)
- Circle to trace. I used the lid of a cooking spray can. It’s about 2 ¼” in diameter. It doesn’t matter what size it is as long as you’ve got enough material to cover it plus ¼”.
- Pen or marker to trace your circle.
- One or two pairs of scissors. You will be cutting cardboard as well as fabric, so you may want to use two different pairs. Please don’t use your best fabric scissors for cutting cardboard!
- Black fleece or felt for the back of your monster. Really anything will work here and it doesn’t even need to be black. Just try to avoid using anything too thin as the hot glue will seep through and it won’t look quite as nice.
- Fun scrap of fabric for the front of your monster. I used long shaggy fur for this tutorial, but anything will work. It’s up to you! Again, I recommend you avoid using thin fabrics like cotton prints, quilting fabrics, flannel, etc. The thicker, the better.
- Googly eyes. These can be found at any craft store in a variety of sizes. I used 12 mm.
- Craft magnets. You can also find these at craft stores in a couple of different sizes. You don’t need the super strong ones unless you’re planning on having your monster hold a ton of papers to the fridge. I just used regular strength 19 mm or ¾” magnets. I found mine at Walmart in a pack of 52 for a little under $6.
- Hot glue gun and hot glue. Other glues would probably work, but I prefer hot glue. It works well on all of the surfaces we’ll be working with and it dries super fast. Just be careful not to burn yourself.
- Trace your circle onto the cardboard and cut it out. Don’t stress about perfection here. It just needs to be round. I suppose it could be any shape you want really—square, triangle, hexagon. Ooh, I see a lot of possibilities for different monster shapes now… moving on.
around the cardboard circle close to the edges. You don’t need to leave any spare fabric around the outside.
cutting fur: always cut from the back and only cut the fabric the fur is connected to--not the fur itself. This
will take a little longer than chomping through the whole thing (fabric and fur), but you’ll be glad you took
the time. If you cut through the fur itself, it will be super messy and look choppy and uneven on the front.
Once you’ve cut out your fur circle, flip it over and gently pull any loose fur away.
put down a small line of glue at a time. If you use too much, the extra will be pushed out and onto your
finger. Ouch!
back of your monster is nice and flat. This will keep fur out of the way of the magnet. If you like things neat
and tidy like me, go ahead and trim off any excess glue or weird edges here as well.
patches of fur where the eyes will sit down to the fabric so the eyes have a nice solid place to stick.
from under the eyes, wait for it to cool and trim it out as best you can with the tip of your scissors. Luckily,
fur will hide any sort of mishap like that quite nicely.
-Sarah