After two days of two children whining non stop, I needed to reward myself with a little project. I started this digger months ago, but it sat in parts without it’s digger since then. So last night I watched some trashy tv (is there anything but?) and stuffed and stitched. I stopped working on it because I wasn’t happy with the design and because I wasn’t sure the digger part would actually come out. But it did. I never want to start working on the hardest part of whatever I’m making, but of course it always ends up being the most satisfying. I made some covered buttons for the button joints (do buttons with shanks even work for button joints?) but I liked the way it looked without them, so they went in the cab. There has been construction in our neighborhood, well, since my daughter was born and she points out all the diggers to me everyday. I thought it would be nice to make a digger for her that was a little on the girlie side. So there you have a slightly tufted, movable, flowery, digger. I’ve got another already cut out, with a slightly different pattern and I thought a patchwork digger would be cool. So more to come, hopefully.I think I’ll enter this into the Holiday Softies Central Awards (right under the wire) because I think it would be a great toy to find under the tree (if you are a 2 year old girl obsessed with diggers, that is).  Here are a bunch of other entries that I think are fantastic. Go look!

hickety pickety my black hen

she lays eggs for gentlemen

gentlemen come everyday

to see what my black hen doth lay.

This is the first of a series I hope to do. Obviously it’s based on the nursery rhyme “Hickety Pickety.” Though I recently discovered that there are two more lines: Sometimes nine, Sometimes ten; Hickety Pickety my black hen. So I guess some eggs are in order. I’ve always liked nursery rhymes, but now that I say it, it sounds strange. My mother would read to me all the time when I was little–from the big, black and white checked Mother Goose book. And because my sisters are much older they had babies when I was the perfect babysitting age and so I read to my nieces and nephews from the same book. And then came high school and college and cigarettes and boys and I forgot completely. But having kids made me remember how lovely those short, little verses can be. They aren’t as intricately constructed as Lewis Carroll’s books and poems, though he did have his way with some (queen of hearts, tweedledum & dee), but the language is still silly and bizarre. And they haven’t been boobified by disney like the fairy tales and really they couldn’t be–some are strangely violent. They are an odd mix of drinking songs and counting rhymes passed down orally. Which I think is fantastic.Jack Sprat and his wife are in the works, but as of this moment are headless.

Actually, it’s quite difficult to find pictures of the things I have made, as most of them were gifts. And, to be honest, probably finished moments before they were given, so there was no time to take a picture. But last year I made a quilt (again as a gift) and I could not stop taking pictures of it. Denyse Schmidt’s book had recently come out and it seemed everyone in the craft world was making a quilt. I have been reading craft blogs for a long time now, and though the pictures and stories are beautiful and inspiring, they tend to make things look easy (not that I blame them. It’s embarassing to write about the full blown argument you had with your sewing machine or admidt to breaking down and sobbing when you discover you have to rip out yet another seam–because, dammit, this is supposed to be relaxing. Or am I the only one who does these things?). Making a quilt is not easy. And making a full size quilt in a month will drive you mad. I picked the pattern that seemed the most straight forward–it was tied, not quilted and all the seams were straight. I was so new to sewing and there was much crying and swearing and walking to the repair shop with an 8 month old on my back and my sewing machine under my arm, but I finished and on time to boot. The experience was incrediblly rewarding: I learned about my machine, about how I work, and how to make a quilt.