Mishmish the Magic Duck is a plush night light of a round little duckling with warm lustrous cheeks. Mishmish’s appearance is based on a childhood stuffed duck toy that brought a lot of comfort in the first few weeks I slept alone (around 4 years of age). I made Mishmish with this experience in mind. I wanted Mishmish to help kids in the developmental phase of initial self-soothing, where they have to sleep without their parents through the entire night. It is a very big change and the presence of comfort and warmth in the form of a stuffed toy can really help with their adjustment.
I tried to make Mishmish as soft and as friendly as possible, therefore I went with using felt for its body, beak, and feet. I used fabric marker for the eyes and added leather components for the rear pockets. 2 yellow LEDs are placed in the cheeks, they were soldered into a parallel circuit and connected to a 5V battery pack.
This project was honestly quite a bit of fun! I got to try out a lot of stuff that I’ve never done before. While I’ve soldered and sewn in the past, they weren’t for projects of this nature at all! I’ve done a lot of circuitboard soldering and leather sewing so they were somewhat adjacent to the skills required for this project. As a result, I wanted to play it a bit safe and so I scoped accordingly. Truth be told I was actually impressed with how I scoped and budgeted my working hours. I was left with a good stretch of time for problem solving anything that wasn’t quite working.
If I had more time to work on my project I would definitely redo the leather components with better material and more care. I was quite careless with how I made these leather parts because I saw them as tertiary, however I think if Mishmish gets some really nice leather doodads, it would give off even more of a warm and homey feeling.
