I posted about these little guys when I was working on them, but now they are all sewn up and ready to be wrapped.  Five presents down, many many more to go.  My sister (hi judith!) picked up this little tree at her local thrift store for me last summer, but I hadn’t taken it out of the box until today.  It’s a perfect little charlie brown tree! I can’t wait to put it in my daughters room and help her decorate it.  We went to Target the other day and had to go around and around their christmas display a hundred times. I liked christmas before, but christmas with a 2 year old is going to be ridiculously fun.

These guys are bridging the gap between halloween and christmas.  Well, there used to be a gap.  Now there is hardly enough time to take down the halloween decorations before the christmas ones come out.  Thanksgiving’s really getting the shaft these days.  Anyway, these mutant gingerbread men are on their way to becoming ornaments for my sister and her family.  When we were kids, we made gingerbread men every year and there were always a couple with two heads or four legs.  But my oldest sister’s three boys took this to another level–they made half bird/half man gingermutants, men with 20 legs and 7 heads,  men covered in eyeballs, poor sweet gingerbread men with all their parts rearranged, anything their strange, little boy imaginations could think up.  My nephews are not little anymore, but I thought they might like a little reminder of their cookie torturing days.  I have one more to make (an octopus gingerbread lady for my sister) and then I’ll sew them and stuff them and maybe even wrap them suckers.  Maybe this will be the year I get my christmas presents done early!

1.little jack horner sat in a corner 2.eating his christmas pie 3.he stuck in his thumb 4.and pulled out 5.a plum 6.and said what a good boy am I!

I was short listed in the Softies Central Holiday Awards! What lovely news to wake up to. Little Jack Horner is a finalist in the Smorgasborg catagory. And he is in good company. There are a bunch of amazing soft toys in every category. The voting starts today and goes until Nov. 16th. So click over to Softies Central and vote!

little jack horner sat in a corner,

eating his christmas pie:

he put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum

and said, “what a good boy am I!”

Here he is pulling out the plum! I was really nervous about tackling the pie and the plum, but surprisingly I didn’t have problems with either (problems with my sewing machine that resulted in very loud swearing, yes). The pie plate has pintucks all around and is stuffed with foam and cotton batting. The pie is a natural linen lined with a purple and red print that I have ridiculous amounts of. I don’t normal like purple, but I thought that it almost looked like the inside of a plum pie: all red and purple and oozy. The pie is just gathered and hand sewn to the plate. I have no idea where this idea came from, but I think it actually looks like the crimped edge of a pie. And as I used to be a baker, I am especially proud of it. The pie also has a little pocket on top to hold the plum. I sewed the pocket in and then made a little bias tape and finished it with that. It looks okay, but I think there are neater ways of doing something like this (putting an invisible pocket not on a seam) that I don’t know of yet. I made the plum from this beautiful deep purple (really, I never liked purple before this) cotton that feels very fine and soft. A half yard of it cost me a whole quarter at my local thrift. It has a little elastic at the bottom to fit over Jack’s thumb and to make it more plum shaped. The plum is stuffed a little and lined with the purple and red print as well. Except for the pie, I stuffed everything with the new eco- friendly fiberfil which is made from corn. It worked pretty well, though I’m not the world’s best stuffer so I don’t trust me. The package doesn’t have any washing directions on it, so I have no idea if you can wash it or not, but you must be able to right?

All in all, I’m really happy with how everything turned out. When I started to make toys from nursery rhyme characters I had this idea that they should be slightly interactive–not really the right word, but you know what I mean. So, Jack, the pie, and the plum are all separate and you can act out the rhyme (if you are so inclined) or just put them in different poses on display. See the whole rhyme in pictures on my flickr page. As I mentioned before, this is my entry for the Softies Central Holiday awards (holiday smorgasbord category). So go look at all the fabulous entries right now!