In which she goes off on one about her dad

Right. My dad. He's the classic grumpy old man. You ask him to do something and he immediately starts whingeing and wailing and clawing at his eyes, but if you turn your back for 20 seconds he sneaks off and does it and pretends it wasn't a problem.

The whingeing and wailing can get a bit much sometimes, so on occasion, my mum and I take a turn at sneaking off and doing things ourselves, which is probably the point of the exercise, even though he doesn't really like not being asked either. You see the problem.

So, whilst we were on holiday in Germany, we had to get the house ready for some overnight guests. This meant that a mattress needed to be got from the loft. I went up. Got the mattress. Then stumbled across a box of old toys and spent the next 30 minutes digging through it. This feller caught my eye.



He's photographed here on the bathroom floor just before his adventure in the washing machine. My mum says I never played with him, but I remember him being around. Anyways, when I saw him this time, I noticed what a nice huggable size he was, and it occurred to me that most of my stuffed monsters are smaller. Nice, but not quite as cuddly as this one. So I decided to nick the pattern and turn it into something monstery.



It feels like a real achievement, actually. It took me a lot of trying and undoing and redoing and then several tries to get the face right. But now, I'm really quite pleased. I think if I want to make these for sale, I'll have to streamline the pattern a bit, but that should be easy enough.