Billie the Monkey - July Month of Softies

Finally finished! It took me a lot longer than I thought it would, primarily because I was determined not to do a half-assed job like I usually do. I made a muslin pattern for the dress like a good sock monkey couturiere.

Her dress is a vintage feedsack, trimmed with a tiny blue vintage picot trim I got in a lot on eBay. Her eyes are vintage buttons from F&S Fabric, one of my favorite fabric stores. She's a lot more demure than I had originally intended, but I'm still very happy with the way she turned out.

Dumpling

When James was a newborn, we started calling him Cuddles. We meant it ironically, because he was so angry all the time, with the flailing and the screaming. To amuse ourselves we would pretend that he could talk (although his grammar wasn't very good). For example, "Cuddles furious!" "Cuddles hungry!" "You pick up Cuddles now! NOW!"

But at four months, he really has become the cuddliest thing imaginable. He's friendly and happy and even when he wakes up in the middle of the night, I'm happy to see him. It doesn't mean that I don't still feel like running away sometimes ... changing my name, maybe getting a job slinging hash somewhere in northern California ...

But at other times I feel like I could hold him forever. There are times when I feel sorry for anyone who doesn't get to spend every minute of the day with him.

If James were a food, he would be a Peking dumpling.

Santa Monica Airport Flea Market

The greater Los Angeles metropolitan area has been blessed with many flea markets, handily scheduled in such a way that you always know which one is coming next. Pasadena City College Flea Market, first Sunday of the month, Rose Bowl, second Sunday, Long Beach, third Sunday, Santa Monica Airport, fourth Sunday. Bill likes PCC and Long Beach best -- they still have a few of the kind of old-school vendors who sell junk, which Bill thinks increases the chance of finding a "treasure."

The Santa Monica Outdoor Antique Market (notice the fancy-shmancy title) is exactly the kind of flea market that Bill hates. Most of the stalls look like they've been put together by professional set decorators, with old French ticking cascading artfully out of old wicker market baskets, and beautifully chipped antique enamelware bowls filled with branches of red coral. It's all very "Country Home Magazine," but I like it.

It occurred to me yesterday that if I woke up very early, I could probably a) beat the heat, and b) stick Bill with the children. So I got out of the house by 7:30, which is unheard of for me (the sun was in the east! So weird!) and arrived at the market so early that I saw Rachel Ashwell herself in the parking lot.

EBay has really changed my attitude towards flea markets in general. Why walk around in the heat looking for Fire King cereal bowls when you can type "Fire King cereal bowl*" into a search engine in the cool comfort of your own home? I've also found that prices on eBay are better than prices at flea markets, even when you factor in shipping. There are a few exceptions: one of them is the button lady by the bathroom at the Rose Bowl, and the other is the $1 linen lady by the chain link fence, also at the Rose Bowl. The linen lady has huge piles (literally, huge piles) of vintage linens that you have to root around in, but anything you find is a dollar. It's great.

She doesn't have her dollar pile at the Santa Monica Market, but she did have some things I loved at reasonable prices, including a bunch of stuff for $1 a piece, like this linen tea towel with a stewardess and the name Mary printed on it

And this old towel, made from a beautiful heavy slubbed linen with my (!) initials in petit-point,

And this pretty panel from an old quilt ($1),



Another quilt panel, pieced together but unquilted,



And a linen doily. I have no idea what to do with it (if I were Rachel Ashwell, I'd probably turn it into a pillow) but I love the bird pattern and the colors ...



And some other things that I didn't photograph -- a silk souvenir scarf of London (my favorite city in the world), a striped dish towel, a child's shoe caddy with appliqued animals on it. And my favorite thing of all, an appliqued and embroidered child's quilt. Here's a closeup of two of the panels. How absurdly cute is this?

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.

4th of July 2005

We had a few people over on the fourth of July for grilled meat and illegal fireworks. Friends of ours picked up the fireworks in Ventura County, where they're not illegal, and brought them back to us. They were the lamest, mildest fireworks ever (nothing like the M-80s my brothers used to get in Mexico) but we're so old and cowardly that we had the garden hose AND a bucket of water all ready to go whenever someone lit a fuse. We repeated the joke "'Light fuse and stand there' -- wait, no -- that's not right -- 'light fuse and run!'" over and over again, and it never got old.

Mary helped make the cupcakes but took a few breaks in between to destroy a few handfulls of paper cocktail umbrellas.

This was Baby J.'s first party. He was an angel, for the most part. I love this picture ...

I found some red sugar and some blue food coloring in the pantry and did my best to decorate the cupcakes in an appropriately patriotic way, given my non-existent cake decorating skills. Upon reflection I decided that "U.S.A. A-OK" was a little jingoistic, so I tried to soften the message with the peace symbol (Peace is Patriotic!). Bill pointed out later that I'd actually drawn the logo for Mercedes-Benz, which isn't the same thing at all.