The first sock monster

In January I was bumbling around with nothing much to do except feel sorry for myself when I visited a friend, Vicky. We chatted and she showed me a present she had made for one of our mutual friends - it was an elephant made of grey socks. It made me laugh. And got me thinking....

I felt inspired and really wanted to make something to do. The elephant she had made was fab but I wanted to do something slightly different. I wanted to make something brighter and more colourful. I also wanted something that would be forgiving if I made little mistakes as I went along - the problem with an elephant is that everyone knows what an elephant is supposed to look like!

I vaguely remembered seeing something about sock monsters. That sounded appealing - no one knows what a monster looks like so there was an opportunity to be creative (and possibly make mistakes!). I hit the internet.

There was so much out there - who knew sock monsters were so popular? In the end I followed several patterns to come up with my own monsters. I used the Blue Peter website (if kids can do it surely I can!), the poster on Nicky's blog Monster-Munch (which is definitely worth a read, she has made some great things) and a tutorial for a sock monkey on Craftbits. I grabbed some M&S socks and was ready to begin....

When I told Vicky my plan she told me to take WIP (work in progress) pics to email to her so for this project I can even show you some of the stages.















(Sorry for the poor picture quality - I didn't know anyone was going to see them at the time!)





I think the mouth was the hardest part and it took a couple of attempts to get it right. The buttons were just random ones I had stashed. It was a simple little project but I really enjoyed making my little monster friend and I was pretty pleased with the end result. Meet Yerk:


Yerk looked so sad and lonely sitting there on his own - I knew I would have to make him some friends. Besides I still had the remains of that three pack of socks to use up!

I'll introduce you to some of Yerk's friends in the next post...

Dotty xx