We are the annoying people who come to your kid's birthday party with homemade presents. It's okay for now I guess, but in a few years, when your kid wants Legos and we bring hand-sewn madras shorts or something, it's going to be really embarrassing for our own children. For our daughter's best friend's fourth birthday birthday a few weeks ago, my wife hand-sewed a stuffed fox (sort of along the lines of the stuffed mouse she made for another 4-year-old last winter). The kid in question loves reading and watching The Fantastic Mr. Fox with his mom, so a fox was an easy decision and I decided to make a book to go along with the animal. The kids and I spent a beautiful morning wandering around the city taking pictures of the stuffed fox in places the birthday boy would recognize. The basic story we made up was along the lines of book/movie, with a Detroit fox who gets cramped in his tiny house, so he sets out to find a new one. This house was too big:

 
He eventually decides that he wants to live at the birthday boy's house, but he finds out he needs to bring the boy some chickens before he can live there. So he tries to catch a "chicken":

But he's just not fast enough, so he drowns his sorrows in a glass of cider at Slow's Bar BBQ (a restaurant owned by the birthday boy's family; we actually ran into him while inside and narrowly averted disaster by hiding the fox behind my back).

The fox returns to his neighborhood and sees his friend (the fox my wife made for our daughter) and she tells him he's been trying to catch pheasants, not chickens (and that chickens are easy to catch).

He can even buy them at Honey Bee Market la Colmena:

But instead, he chooses to follow his fox instincts and steal some chickens from the urban farmers of North Corktown:

With two chickens in hand, he makes his way to his new home. The last page of the book showed him on the boy's porch, and we hid the stuffed fox right by the door before reading the book to him.

Once we were done shooting the photos, we uploaded them to Shutterfly and used their software to quickly turn them into a gift book (full disclosure: Shutterfly has advertised on Sweet Juniper before, though this post and production were not undertaken as part of any advertising campaign or sponsorship---we just like the product enough to keep using it).

After less than an hour of taking pictures, we were able to create a really personal book where the character went to really familiar places like the birthday boy's favorite playground and even his dad's office (his dad, a realtor, is the one who helps the fox figure out where he's going to live). We were able to include a picture of his dad in the book, as well as get a small image of the recipient himself in there via the pictures on his dad's desk:

It involved some planning (the books take about a week to get printed and shipped) but it really didn't take that much time to get it all done. And the birthday boy and his parents were really appreciative. Wood highly recommends Kata Golda's book Hand-Stitched Felt for making these easy stuffed creatures. 

Previous Project: Old-fashioned bed roll

Knitting has helped tear me away from my sewing machine, and I love being able to make something without sequestering myself in our dark basement tied to my sewing machine for hours. I bought Kata Golda's Hand-Stitched Felt hoping to find quick, easy projects that I could make completely by hand, and I was not disappointed. Not only is wool felt lovely to touch and work with, but there is something incredibly satisfying and meditative about hand sewing. (I try to relax and enjoy the process when I'm machine sewing, but more often than not I work in a frenzy and emerge from the basement harried and covered with a million stray bits of thread and fabric.)

I made the little gal pictured above in one night after the kids were in bed. I only had one night to do it, because the next day was our niece's birthday party, but one night was plenty of time. The only modification I made to Kata's pattern was that I made the shirt out of fabric instead of felt to match a quilt I'd recently given to the birthday girl's baby sister.

I highly recommend this book if you're interested in getting into stuffed creatures but are a bit intimidated by a sewing machine, or if you just feel like taking a break from your machine. It could not be easier, and the end result is pretty adorable.

(it might be hard to tell from the picture, but the doll is about 12 inches tall.)

Previous Project: Unlicensed Lion King Playset

One of the most hilarious parts of having younger children is that you can totally get away with making their Christmas presents yourself and not having them react with visceral disgust. In a few years, our boy will be pining for a Playstation 5 or an XBox 1080 or whatever, and even if we spend countless hours knitting him a protective koozie for his two-year-old Nintendo Yuu controller chances are he's going to spend Christmas morning pretty damn disappointed. But now, not so much. This year we went full hippie and made the gifts we gave the kids, buying only a few accessories and stocking stuffers. And they didn't explode with disappointment.

We spent WEEKS in our secret workshop making some stuffed totoros. In the past, I might have stuck my own nose up at handmade gifts made to resemble characters from a movie, but as I've written before, we think My Neighbor Totoro is just about the greatest kid's movie ever and I have no qualms about letting them watch it. There are some "official" Totoro toys, but the big ones are really expensive and don't seem that great anyways. The girl's favorite scene from the movie is when Mei first finds the Totoro and climbs up on his belly, so we wanted to make a GIANT stuffed one for her.

We bought our fabric at small chain in western Michigan that always has a really good selection of fur fabric (we bought the fabric for the Halloween costumes there). With the eyeballs, whiskers, felt, and stuffing the total came to about $33.00. The gray fabric on the right was for the big totoro, and the blue was for the smaller one. The plush fabric on the left was for the bellies, and it is so soft it makes your average baby blanket feel like sandpaper coated with shards of broken glass. 

Wood did all the cutting and machine sewing, I drew the patterns and hand-sewed the smaller pieces (like leather claws, noses, eyeballs, and the detachable leaf hats and smiles). The claws I cut from leather that was leftover from what some Amish guys used to upholster one of my dad's antique cars (it was hard as hell to hand sew; I had to use pliers to pull the needle through). The nose is from an old leather purse. The eyes, smile, and leaf hat are all 100% wool felt.

I may have drawn it, but Wood was the one who translated the sketch into the right proportions to make everything feel like a real stuffed animal. Now I'll turn this narrative over to the master crafter.

WOOD: Jim makes it sound way easier than it was. I've never made a stuffed animal before, not even a small one, and I have to confess that there were many late December nights where I was convinced that the whole idea --- making a giant totoro without a pattern -- was a horrible one. I spent one late night at the sewing machine muttering "harebrained idea" and "ruining Christmas" at him under my breath. [it's true, we had quite a bit of conflict before getting these done---jdg]

I go through that with a lot of projects --- that moment in the middle where you lose confidence in your ability and you're tempted to chuck the whole thing out the window.  It's a totally necessary, yet extremely ugly, phase I have to get through before I can deliver a project.

Jim was the brains behind this idea, yet he has less understanding of sewing and construction of stuffed animals than I do. He was confident that I could figure this out, even when I wasn't. As with more things than I'd like to count, he was right in the end, and the big totoro in particular came out almost exactly how we wanted it to (third time's a charm).

The kids were completely surprised and thrilled to find the totoros waiting for them next to the tree. The moment was pretty magical, and it made all the late night sewing worth it. On Christmas night, as Juniper was going to bed, my mom asked her what her favorite part of Christmas was, and she said it was coming down the stairs and finding the totoros under the tree.

 

She's pretty attached to it.

Gram calls the little one "my Totoro."

Jim also made another present for the kids (with some help from me). We'll post that one next.

Previous Project: Knit a Sweater