Our big DIY project for Christmas was making Z some "bunnybears" (yeah, we'd never heard of one either) and I decapitated and otherwise mutilated a couple of stuffed animals in the process. One of them, a donkey wearing bunny slippers and a nightcap, yielded an interesting motor designed to make his chest rise up and down in time with an audio "snore." I salvaged the motor while depriving him of some of his body parts, and pulled it out recently for a project. The only catch was I couldn't tell Z where it had come from, because the gift of the bunnybears came straight from Santa.


The other day we found a suitable transplant recipient. We carefully cut an opening for the motor and also one to thread the "button" into (these are typically placed in the hand or foot of the doll, and are basically a switch that triggers the motor to activate. Rather than try to get the button itself to pass through a very narrow leg, I cut a secondary slit and just sewed things up tight with a bit of wire left showing.

She sleeps with her eyes open, but we'll take what we can get. I had to maneuver a bit in the video below to get a view that shows the belly movement; it's pretty dramatic in person.


ZRecs.com photo by incurable_hippie, shared via Flickr.