This is a little seahorse ornament I made for a friend of mine. We watched a couple DVDs from the BBC production Planet Earth, which if you haven’t seen you better pretty soon. There are five discs and all of them are amazing–especially the caves, go rent the one about caves right now. This pygmy seahorse is from the shallow sea episode. There were two of these unbelievably small, red, polka dotted sea horses battling it out for a woman or territory (it’s always one of the two). It might have been the greatest battle of their lives, but to us it looked like they were bouncing off each other. Doink! Doink! Their polka dots didn’t make it any easier to take them seriously. I embroidered some random french knots all over and then did a sad blanket stitch around the whole thing. And there you have the smallest seahorse in the world ready to duke it out.

I had a thousand ideas for the holiday ornament swap–most were crap or required way too much work, some were pretty good but I never wrote them down, and the best ones I thought of were things I could of done if I had thought of them sooner. Ultimately, something had to be made and this is what did. Little stuffed christmas birds. They are two pieces sewn together, but the tail is sewn perpendicular to the other seam. Does that make sense? I wanted to make something stuffed, but didn’t want to sew up 10 stuffing holes (that is my least favorite part) so I left the tail open, stuffed the bird, and machine stitched the opening to look like tail feathers. Oh, this is not making sense, but whatever. Some look like christmas seals, some like christmas chickens, but at least one turned out the way I hoped. They just need their hangers (loops, string, you know) and an envelope and they can go in the very large pile that will hopefully get to the post office monday morning. If you are in group 44 (represent!) they will be on your tree soon.

click here to see all the faux bois builders.People love making forest creatures, so why not make the forest too. I tried my hand at this plush craze. But when it’s late and you should be in bed and not attempting to start something new, you don’t realize that if you make softie that looks like a cake that looks like a log it just ends up looking like a piece of wood. duh. I thought it was a genius idea to make a little plush buche de noel for the ornament swap, but it just looks like a sad little log. Oh well, I have a couple more ideas. My first ornament came in the mail today, so I better get a move on.