Cheery Souls !

One of my New Year resolutions is to make something creative and to blog about it, every week. Just heard someone on the radio say " it is making things that makes us all human"...

So here goes...

Isn't January the best time to be working on a project, tucked up indoors while the snow and ice does its worst? Nick's sister much admired my sock creatures that I made last year and remarked that she would just love to have a creature of her own. I had loads of ideas for other doggy mutts or feline fluffies that I could work up, so when she said "I'd like a bookworm sock creature you can imagine my face (reading her email that is). So I scratched my head a bit, book worms aren't the cutest things to look at, needs to be a bit worm like with an outstanding intellect and appetite for devouring books. And here he is - Bob the Bookworm.. Hppe you like the photos, Max the dog acted as a stage extra ! Must go now to pop Bob in the post.

The creature took an afternoon to physically make and I used:

1. 1 small wool sock that had shrunk in the wash and become a bit felted. It is good to use a smallish sock to get really good features.

2. off cuts of another wool sock - enough to make the inside of the mouth

3. wire, buttons and fibrefill.

4. jam jar or other cylindrical object that you can put your sock on before stuffing.

METHOD:

1. Cut the heel off the sock and keep it for creature hands later. Each side of the mouth opening make a neck by making small half- moon shaped darts. The narrower the neck you want, the deeper the dart.

2. Put the sock over the jam jar and decide what kind of mouth you're going to give the critter.

3. Insert wool off-cut into the mouth opening and hand stitch it in. leave a small gap between the cut edge of the "mouth" - this will become the lips. You will now have a mouth that is just hanging open with no character.

4. Take the sock of the jam jar and softly stuff the body. Rework the lips with the stuffing so that you have a smile you like the look of.

5. Nose: to make the nose take a ball of stuffing, put it up into the face and stitch around to form a nose you like. You can make as big or small as you like.

6. Button eyes are attached using black thread to give a hard staring eye effect, now hand stitch around to form eye brows, bags under the eyes etc.

7. Lower body, extra stuffing here and a small bag of lintels was placed at the bottom . To do this cut two circles ( I used a glass as a template) from cotton. Backstitched around them and left a small opening to pour the lentils through. fold the bottom over to give a flat bottomed base and back stitch closed. You can add a flat tail made from the rib of the sock top

8. Worm wrinkle features on the back are made by folding over a small piece of material and slip-stitching over. Add as many wrinkles as you like.

9. Hands: Cut two holes in the body for the hands. These were made from toe off-cuts, and to make the fingers movable cut small lengths of coated florist wire and bend into finger shapes, and push into the wooly hand. Stuff hands with fibre fill and back stitch in place.

10. Extra accessories: I made a mug from a corduroy off-cut with fibre-fill as froth, and a book from Embroidery aida and stitched these to the hands.