A Crafting Disaster: Monkeys and Directions

Yesterday my mom and I decided to attempt to make a sock monkey. My mom has been wanting to make a sock monkey out of cute striped socks for about a year. We finally found some socks online and some other ones at Gordman's over break, so we could attempt this craft. We used this tutorial, and it was pretty easy to follow. I drew the short straw for this project and had to stuff the monkey (at first I thought I was smart because I wouldn't have to use the sewing machine...I was wrong).

We started sewing the first sock for the monkey's legs and then the sewing machine malfunctioned which put our project an hour hiatus while we searched the house for the manual for the sewing machine--which we never found. We googled the sewing machine manual but magically my mom figured out how to fix it, without making me read it (Thank Goodness!!).

Stuffing the tail was pretty simple but stuffing the arms were horrible. The arms are teeny tiny and very hard to turn right side out, much less fill with stuffing. I used a knitting needle to help shove the stuffing into the arms, but it took a solid hour to stuff the two arms (This is when I proclaimed to my mom that we should just buy sock monkeys going forward).

Trying to turn the arms right side out...

My lumpy stuffing job.

The tail completely stuffed

My mom had to give the monkey an episiotomy (if you don't know what this is, don't google it, just enjoy living in ignorance) because she didn't leave the crotch big enough to turn the sock monkey right side out. Poor little monkey, luckily she stitched the monkey's bum right back up and she was good as new.

Poor Monkey

Peggy finished all of the hand sewing on the sock monkey. She kept making me read the directions out loud to her, because she "hates reading directions". Ding! Ding! Ding! Now we know where I get my issues with directions from.

All of the monkey parts

Hand sewing- no thank you. :)

We named the monkey Twiggy because my mom thinks the sock monkey's arms that are way too long , but for a first try I think we did okay. The monkey still needs a mouth embroidered on, and a nose, but we ran out of time last evening.

Twiggy without a face or ears

Twiggy, basically complete

On another topic, today I started cutting out fabric for my "Awesome Bag". I am really bad at cutting out fabric, I had to cut out 6 squares and 2 rectangles, and it took me 3 episodes of Weeds (I am loving that we have netflix for the month that I am home) to complete.