Ouchie fingers. Off Topic Day.

Heh, it's true, ouchie finger day.  I've got a couple of blisters from pulling those staples out of the pantry floor so I thought I'd take a break, let my hands recover a bit.

Plus I needed to get hopping on making birthday gifts for my cute little nephews out in California.

(Ok, Jeff and Yan, stop reading now if you want to be surprised.  I guess you can probably see the photo below though, so part of surprise spoiled.  Rats!!  But seriously, stop reading if you don't want to know!)

I have to get the gifts done and to my folks before Wednesday as they are heading out there to visit, so the heat is on.  I've been thinking about what to make for the boys for, oh, about two months now.  And, as is always the case, I can't ever seem to come up with anything until nearly the last minute for some reason.

So I thought I'd take a break from flipping the flip and make this sock cat since the younger one loves cats.

www.makezine.com (Professor Pincushion)

Super cute, right?  Here's a link to the tutorial.

Here I thought, oh ok, give my poor widde hands a breaky-poo but little did I know, this cat took a lot of hand stitching, some of it not so easy.  Ouchie!  Now along with the blisters, all my finger tips hurt.  Heh!  No win, right?!  :)

By the way, don't be fooled by the half hour long tutorial.  It took me about 3.5 hours to make the cat.  It's also not really a novice gig either.  Not that it's hard, it isn't, but if this is the first thing you ever try to stitch, you might have a spot of difficulty here and there.  And what they don't tell you but should is that having a half round curved needle will help tremendously.  If only I figured that out towards the beginning of the project....

Anyway, despite my desires to have it come out perfectly just like theirs and it didn't, I still think it came out kinda sweet.

Huh, wait.  I guess it kind of looks like a dog now that I look at it again.  Hm.  I better get some whiskers on it like the tutorial though I can't find any black embroidery thread anywhere in the house.  And maybe that pink nose too instead of the button I applied.  Being a non-cat person, I guess anything I make will turn out looking like a dog, huh?

The best part about working on this today was listening to Hailey snoring behind me all afternoon.

Jake is getting a handmade pop up book.  It will be the story of the history of ice cream along with a gift card to what looks to be a ridiculously tasty ice cream shop.  (Thanks Mom for the gift card idea!)  Having been a huge fan of ice cream all my life, a fan of making and eating my own ice cream, and even working at a Ben and Jerry's scoop shop as a teenager, this is right up my alley.

In researching the history of ice cream, I came across a lot of nifty information.  I was excited and prattled on and on about it to Mike who was a history major in college.  He was highly amused by my enthusiasm.

Anyway, turns out a lot of the history is possibly a myth, which was a big letdown, hence now it's the story of the history, not the history of for my book.

As part of the purported history, we're related to Charles I so that's fun.  There could be hair of a chance that we're related to an ice cream cookbook writer in England from the 1880's, Agnes Bertha Marshall, which would be fun too and maybe explain my predilection towards ice cream.  If not, ah well, the book should be adorable anyway.  Or so I hope!

I plan on following this tutorial to help me make it.

All righty, back to nursing my poor little hands!  Happy Friday, y'all!

***Update***

Now it looks like a cat, yes?