Monkey boy

I don't make kid's items for my Etsy shop and my track record for making baby gifts is mixed. I'm terrible at guessing sizes so my things are usually too small. Now that I have three nephews and two nieces all under 3, I have more opportunities to try to get it right! Here's a preview of the Christmas presents for the 7 month old twin boys and the one-year old nephew on the other side of the family. Pretty cute, huh? I can't wait to see what these look like on!

Making the badges for the initials was a good warm up for the more complicated project ahead. The monkey applique is a new technique for me. I drew the monkey on my computer. Any real graphic designers would be horrified to know that I actually used MS Word to draw the ovals and circles. I saved it as a PDF then resized it when printing it. If I remembered how to use Adobe Illustrator, I'm sure I could have made a really cool vector graphic and done all kinds of neat things. As it is, I'm so proud that this worked at all! Once printed I cut out the main shape, taped it to my felt and cut that out. Then I trimmed the pattern down to the next interior shape, taped that to lighter brown felt and cut that out. I glued the two pieces of felt together and cut and glued the inside ear half moons. I stitched on the button eyes, white buttons with black buttons on top, and added the yarn smile and nose. I glued the whole thing on to the hat and then carefully did a running backstitch all the way around the monkey face. Finally, I added a stitch in the middle of the ear to tack down that tiny sliver of felt. Now all of the felt pieces are glued and sewn (the eyes, mouth and nose hold down the center felt piece).


These were fun projects. I'm looking forward to giving these as presents and maybe trying my hand at other animals in the future!