just a little flickr action for the weekend.

click on the picture for all photo credits.

The campaign is in full swing! All of Jack’s friends came out to support him: his beloved pie backed him right away, Hickety Pickety thought him a fine gentlemen, Jack Sprat wouldn’t think of voting for anyone else, and his wife made the lovely signs. So now it’s your turn. Get the word out–Little Jack Horner’s got the prettiest plum pie in the Holiday Smorgasbord! Don’t sit in a corner, go vote!

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!

After two days of two children whining non stop, I needed to reward myself with a little project. I started this digger months ago, but it sat in parts without it’s digger since then. So last night I watched some trashy tv (is there anything but?) and stuffed and stitched. I stopped working on it because I wasn’t happy with the design and because I wasn’t sure the digger part would actually come out. But it did. I never want to start working on the hardest part of whatever I’m making, but of course it always ends up being the most satisfying. I made some covered buttons for the button joints (do buttons with shanks even work for button joints?) but I liked the way it looked without them, so they went in the cab. There has been construction in our neighborhood, well, since my daughter was born and she points out all the diggers to me everyday. I thought it would be nice to make a digger for her that was a little on the girlie side. So there you have a slightly tufted, movable, flowery, digger. I’ve got another already cut out, with a slightly different pattern and I thought a patchwork digger would be cool. So more to come, hopefully.I think I’ll enter this into the Holiday Softies Central Awards (right under the wire) because I think it would be a great toy to find under the tree (if you are a 2 year old girl obsessed with diggers, that is).  Here are a bunch of other entries that I think are fantastic. Go look!

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!