Not Crocheted, But....

🐇Easter Basket Stuffy🐇

Up-cycling single purpose Easter baskets.  The idea came to me when shopping for the Easter Bunny, and these adorable Easter baskets were staring me in the face with the cute "take me home" eyes, but I despise waste.  Why make something that has one purpose to be thrown away, and they were $10 each, to boot.  You are literally throwing away your money, and they way they are made, the plastic breaks down with use, so allowing the kids to keep them, while a decent idea, it just doesn't last through what kids will put them through.  Then I thought, why not make them stuffed animals?  I didn't have any pattern to make it work, but had the thought to use the material from the basket handle to add an extra panel so it doesn't warp.
If you have similar baskets that you just don't have the heart to discard, this is my step-by-step how to

Items you'll need:
scissors
sewing thread
needles
seam ripper (or embroidery snips like mine)
basic sewing pins
basket (duh)

To start, you'll need to rip the seam for the basket.  The plastic needs to come out.  There were plastic panels in the bottom of both of mine.  You can keep it in, but it will affect the huggability of your stuffy, and it could potentially create a warp in the overall shape if you don't have enough handle panel.  I took mine out.  

If your has ears, the seam thread connects them and will fall off, as will your handles.  To counteract this, I sewed the ears on as the original seam was pulled out to avoid any need to remeasure.  I'd rather not end up with crooked ears.  The seam for the bottom of the basket may connect to the bottom of your stuffy, and there are two ways to remove it, if you choose to do so.  You can cut the seam around the bottom and resew the stitches, or you can cut the inside material and pull it out, which is what I did. If you go from the inside, there is no need to sew it back together. What you'll get will look something like this:

  Now that you have your pieces, you will need to find the seam of your handle (pull the plastic out) and you'll have a flat fuzzy strip of material.  This will be your back panel.  If you'll notice, the two baskets are different shapes.  The unicorn is circular, the dinosaur was oval.  The shape and measurement is very important.  Since the dinosaur was oval, I only had to pin the handle strip to the back, stuffed it, and sewed together.  With this unicorn, I had to cut the handle in half, sew it long ways together to create a square back panel, then pinned it together, stuffed, and sewed.