Forget teddy bears: This artist makes plush fried chicken, cigarettes and lottery tickets

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Textile artist Jane Jauregui is expanding the boundaries of what plush figures can be, thinking beyond that pile of mass-produced, branded stuffies huddled atop a twin bed, crammed inside a toy chest, or dangling from a backpack strap.

True, in the nearly two decades that she’s been creating plush figures, she’s produced charmingly minimalistic foxes, cats and buffalo fit for a nursery. However, her latest work has been anything but child’s play.

A plush fried chicken bucket is one of Jane Jauregui’s textile takes on beloved dishes. She launched her “soft sculpture” company, STFD, in 2024 with the intention of transforming her inner thoughts into plush form — no matter how outside the box those ideas may be. After all, why bring yet another teddy bear into the world when you can dream up a stuffed paintbrush trailing a splash of brightly colored felt “paint,” or a striped bucket filled with faux fried chicken?

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“It stands for Stuff That Feeds Delight,” Jauregui said of the brand’s acronymic name. “The newer things I’m working on are more like display items, but you can absolutely touch them,” she explained. “I just started playing more with the idea of decor, aging it up a little bit more, and playing with the idea of how we can really elevate it.”

Take, for example, a plate of longsilog, the traditional breakfast meal her Filipina grandmother used to make for her. Inside the converted garage of the same Van Nuys house where she was raised, Jauregui whipped up a playful sausage-riceball-fried egg combo using a sewing needle, felt, embroidery floss and sherpa fleece, rather than pots and pans.

Moved by memories of her grandfathers, she created a collection of stuffed felt cigarette butts, complete with simulated ash made by zigzagging stitches.

“My Thai and Filipino grandpas were chain-smokers,” she said. “They passed away, and I just started thinking a lot about what would represent them. Cigarettes immediately came to mind.”

Jane Jauregui’s home studio inside the converted garage of her childhood home. Though she takes inspiration from her personal experiences, many of her plush figures strike a universal note. Most anyone born in the 20th century would take one look at her plush retro alarm clock radio and instinctively feel the urge to whack its elongated vinyl “snooze” button. The trompe l’oeil wood paneling (which she made by printing a wood-grain design directly onto dark brown fabric) and the red-tinted digital readout screen (the numbers are iron-on transfers) make it a dead ringer for those once-commonplace nightstand devices that predated smartphone alarms.

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She first tried her hand at the craft about 18 years ago, after she and her husband, Sergio, couldn’t find the right gift for his newborn niece at famed New York City toy emporium FAO Schwarz.

“Everything was licensed, and I didn’t want any kind of IP [intellectual property],” she recalled. “I went home and said, ‘Well, I’m just going to sew something for her.’ Sergio was like, ‘But you don’t know how to sew, so that’s a little crazy.’ I said, ‘That’s OK, I’ll figure it out!’”

1. A plush hot dog. 2. An ashtray full of plush cigarettes, inspired by Jane Jauregui’s grandparents.

Fortunately, she had a leg up when it came to picking up the new skill. Her father, a retired clothing designer and patternmaker, had introduced her to the inner workings of the garment industry from a young age.

“My dad would have full-time work five days a week, so there wasn’t a lot of time for him to teach me,” she said. “But when he would take freelance work home, I would sit in this garage with him. He had a big table, and I would sit there and watch him sew. It was just really how we spent time together.

“When I decided to start making plush, I remembered little things he would do, like how to walk a pattern — which is making sure the pattern pieces are matching — or how he would move the ruler. I would remember all of those things and put my own spin on it.”

Artist Jane Jauregui eschews watercolors and acrylics, preferring to “paint with plush.” She started by making simple shapes like a stuffed orange, pear and an eggplant, working her way up to the finalized baby gift: a stuffed whale. By 2009, she’d completed enough plush produce to start selling at local pop-up markets under the business name Janie XY. Sergio, an artist in his own right, even constructed her first booth to resemble a fruit stand. Her first hit item was a baby rattle shaped like a chicken drumstick that was sold wrapped in cellophane, much like a meat-counter purchase. This time, her muse was her own infant niece.

All the while, she was holding down a full-time job creating window displays for Forever 21. She continued to build her squeezable empire in her off-hours, even as she transferred to corporate jobs at Mattel and Disney (for which she’s now a consumer products design manager), and became a mother. Taking a page from her father, she’s made her at-home workspace accessible to her 4-year-old daughter, Ruby.

“She’s in here all the time,” she said. “I let her touch everything. What’s fun about the medium is you can’t break it. You can get it dirty, but she knows what to do. She’s really mature about it. She loves to clean the sewing machine — she’ll go in with a pin and pick out all the lint, and she’ll think that was a good day’s work. We want her to feel like part of the work because she is a part of it.”

Jane Jauregui’s sewing machine, which her daughter likes to clean, in her home studio. That said, Jauregui’s STFD creations aren’t necessarily made with the wee ones in mind. Consider her new pieces celebrating liquor stores, for which she converted items like lottery tickets and frothing beer cans into plush form.

“It’s something that we all take for granted,” she said of the ubiquitous neighborhood corner store. “You tend to turn your nose up at it, but it’s there for you all the time.”

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She and her husband also pay homage to these unsung cultural hubs in the latest edition of their fledgling zine, which they’ve dubbed “a gallery you can hold.” Inside, photographs of the stuffed figures fill the pages, accompanied by written musings. (The one-of-a-kind featured items will also be available for purchase.) The series is the couple’s prescribed antidote to the social media doomscrolling they call “internet indigestion.”

Jane Jauregui’s goal for the plush items she makes in her studio? Delight. She’s also planning to explore plush Thai food in honor of Grandma’s Thai Kitchen, the Van Nuys restaurant her mother owned and operated for years. After treks to downtown L.A.’s Fashion District to find just the right materials, she’ll mock up clever riffs on julienned ginger and cilantro leaves. For her, there’s ample delight in those little details.

“STFD is really about giving myself permission to just do things that make me happy,” she said.

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Christina House is a staff photojournalist with the Los Angeles Times. She joined the visual journalism team in 2017 after 10 years as a freelance photographer. House won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography and the 2022 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for Domestic Photography for “Hollywood’s Finest,” an intimate look into the life of a pregnant 22-year-old woman living on the street. She was part of the team that was a finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography, and she received the 2021 Cliff Edom New America Award for her work on “Game Changers: A Celebration of Women in Sports” from the 2021 National Press Photographers Assn.’s Best of Photojournalism awards.

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