Preparing to Tie One On

I bought my apron pattern for "Tie One On" last week. When I got home and looked through my stuff, I realized that I already had it! A pattern so nice, I bought it twice.


I'm going to try to make the smock-style apron in the center on the clothesline, for Mary. I think I'm using this fabric:




I love the big yellow circle fabric, but I'm a little worried that it will be too overpowering. We'll see. The pattern seems pretty straightforward -- I hope I can get around to it. James can only stand the Fisher Price Ocean Aquarium Bouncy Seat for so long.

Also, there's the new Harry Potter book to be read. The last one was released on the day of Mary's birthday party, and even after a long day of entertaining preschoolers (and their parents) I stayed up all night -- quite literally until the sun came up -- reading it. Because I'm a huge nerd.

Another good way to "age" a sock monkey

... is to make so many mistakes embroidering the face that you have to pick everything out, leaving holes that give the monkey an authentically "distressed" look.

The good news is that I've been able to get some work in on the damned thing every evening since our ten-year-old TV set broke and was taken away for repairs. The family room looks oddly empty without it -- it's one of those enormous black widescreen sets that look a lot like the monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey," and we are very similar to the apes who worship it. But it could have been worse. It could have been sweeps! So Bill is reading THE CORRECTIONS and I'm working on my crafts and interrupting him every five minutes to ask "What part are you on now? Have you gotten to the part where Chip goes to Lithuania?"

I loved THE CORRECTIONS.

With any luck the TV set will be gone long enough for me to make some headway on some of my works in progress. I have a sweater for James that's knit up but not yet assembled and will probably have to go to one of Mary's dolls, since James has undoubtedly outgrown it by now. Time makes fools of us all.

And now I've got the new Rowan book, CLASSIC BABIES, which has some beautiful patterns like this and this using Rowan's new Cashsoft yarn. I can't buy the yarn until I finish James' sweater, whether it fits him or not, just like poor old Chip wasn't allowed to leave the table until he'd finished his liver. I love THE CORRECTIONS!

The Rowan book also has patterns for some adorable stuffed animals.

Important Lessons in Sock Monkey Making

Even before I saw the gorgeous sock monkeys at Peng-Peng Bears and the beautiful example posted by Two Trees in the Month of Softies group on Flickr, I knew that I wanted my sock monkey to have an antique look. I'd been cruising eBay for inspiration and found that every monkey I liked looked old and worn -- and like they'd been put together by someone with a style that was both eccentric and frugal, with odds and ends of fabric and notions left over from other projects. That's one of the things I find charming about the whole concept of sock monkeys -- if you look at the pattern, you see that nothing goes to waste. You use up every bit of both socks. It reminds me of the way people used to use old feed sacks for childrens' clothing and quilts and aprons. There's something about the way that practicality and creativity work together in these beautiful old objects that makes me very, very happy.

I'm still working on the monkey, but I've learned some valuable lessons so far. First -- black dye is serious business and nothing to be messed with. Ditto bleach.

Second -- if you're going to stuff a sock monkey with rags, you're going to need a lot of rags. My monkey's inner workings are composed of one child's pajama top, half of an old t-shirt of my husband's, and an entire pair of size extra large men's jersey sweat pants!

Tea dye seems to have worked pretty well, combined with a little Dylon dye in Koala Brown. I used the dye bath to dye a onesie for James. The color is really pretty -- a medium reddish brown. I'm hoping to embroider it later. The onesie came from the American Apparel outlet at the Woodbury Commons Outlet Center, where they were selling slightly irregular onesies and t-shirts for four bucks each. My trip to Woodbury Commons was otherwise unremarkable, except for the time the bus caught on fire.

Okay, it wasn't really a fire. We were just arriving at Woodbury Commons when huge billows of smoke began to errupt from the back of the bus. We yelled at the driver to stop, but he only slowed down a little. We all got out of our seats and crammed ourselves into the aisle -- the guy next to me, who had been quietly reading the Village Voice all the way from Port Authority, actually began to climb over the seats in front of us towards the door.

The story ends anticlimactically -- the bus driver finally stopped and we all got out and walked the rest of the way.