This isn’t quite a year in review, seeing as I’ve only had this blog since September, but the pictures are all toys I designed and made since then. Really it’s more of a gratuitous pat on the back for finally getting off my ass and making the things I think up.   I’m horrible when it comes to doing new things, especially when they are creative endeavors.  The teenager in me is scared of what people will think and of failing miserably and the grown woman in me doesn’t understand where the hell the impulse to make soft toys came from anyway (there must be a Frosted Flakes joke in there somewhere).

I have a bunch of things I want to do for my kids, my husband, my house, and even my poor dogs this new year, but I would like to open up an etsy shop for me.  We’ll see. I have to make a few more things first (and I have to figure out packaging, branding, shipping, blurb writing).  I have a whole year to cross that one thing off my list.

This is a little seahorse ornament I made for a friend of mine. We watched a couple DVDs from the BBC production Planet Earth, which if you haven’t seen you better pretty soon. There are five discs and all of them are amazing–especially the caves, go rent the one about caves right now. This pygmy seahorse is from the shallow sea episode. There were two of these unbelievably small, red, polka dotted sea horses battling it out for a woman or territory (it’s always one of the two). It might have been the greatest battle of their lives, but to us it looked like they were bouncing off each other. Doink! Doink! Their polka dots didn’t make it any easier to take them seriously. I embroidered some random french knots all over and then did a sad blanket stitch around the whole thing. And there you have the smallest seahorse in the world ready to duke it out.

I had a thousand ideas for the holiday ornament swap–most were crap or required way too much work, some were pretty good but I never wrote them down, and the best ones I thought of were things I could of done if I had thought of them sooner. Ultimately, something had to be made and this is what did. Little stuffed christmas birds. They are two pieces sewn together, but the tail is sewn perpendicular to the other seam. Does that make sense? I wanted to make something stuffed, but didn’t want to sew up 10 stuffing holes (that is my least favorite part) so I left the tail open, stuffed the bird, and machine stitched the opening to look like tail feathers. Oh, this is not making sense, but whatever. Some look like christmas seals, some like christmas chickens, but at least one turned out the way I hoped. They just need their hangers (loops, string, you know) and an envelope and they can go in the very large pile that will hopefully get to the post office monday morning. If you are in group 44 (represent!) they will be on your tree soon.

Two christmas presents done. I think I have started everyone’s gift, but finished a sad few. The starting is the exciting part; the hemming and trimming thread and finding a #@*% box to put them in is not. I’m desperately trying to get at least most of the gifts that have to be sent in the mail by friday, but I’m sitting here eating gingerbread cookies (stolen from my daughter’s St. Nick gift–thanks mom!). These two are from Sock and Glove, the japanese craft book (in english) by Miyako Kanamori. I have a few japanese craft books (in japanese) and I can follow all the diagrams, but always feel like I’m missing something. And I am–to fold an opening closed these are the directions given in the book: “Fold the back of the head like a caramel-candy wrapper.” It makes perfect sense, but how bizarre. These were a lot of fun to make. There was quite a bit of hand sewing involved, but they came together pretty quickly. The horse is actually a zebra pattern–same thing, right? That’s what I thought, but I should have made the mane longer to make it a little more horse like (equine, I guess). Oh well, he still cuddly. It’s pretty fantastic that these two came from two pairs of socks. There is a great pattern in the book for a sweater made from a sock as well. If there’s time (ha!) maybe I’ll whip one up for the elephant. I found this soft toy glove book as well with patterns for squirrels and bananas!