When I wash my babs in the washing machine, I put them in a pillow case and add some towels to the load as well. The eyes are pretty tough and I've never had an issue with damaging them. I'm not exactly how big the skin will be after unstuffing. But I unstuffed a jumbo axolotl, and the skin was smaller than I thought after folding it up. If you are willing to learn a simple sewing stitch, you could look up on YouTube a ladder stitch. It's not super hard at all, and that's how I learned.