Making Munky

I was on a roll after my skirt success and decided to tackle a toy monkey for little M from this very cool book Cute Dolls by Japanese authors Aronzo Aronzi.

It looked simple enough. Chop up an old t-shirt, stuff it, sew on tail, sew on face, job done. 

But I discovered sewing straight lines with cotton fabric is one thing, sewing curves and around corners in jersey is a whole other world of difficulty. The stuff is like those fortune fish that roll up in the palm of your hand to tell your future. No amount of ironing could get that bloomin’ monkey to lie flat.

It must be somewhere in the manual but I could not figure how to loosen the presser foot, so my fabric kept bunching up whenever I tried to turn a corner. Because of my completely inaccurate sewing, poor Munky ended up much smaller and wonkier than planned.

His arm and leg sockets were so minute I had a job trying to stuff the plastic pellets into his extremities. I should have made a paper cone with a little hole at the end to pour the pellets through, but I didn’t think of it at the time. Instead I used the small end of a plastic medicine spoon, which worked out okay.

There was a lot of disagreement about which side Munky’s face should go on - patterned or plain, and what colour his face should be - tan or pink, so he spent a several weeks completely facefree. Surprisingly despite looking very handmade and having no face he was a huge hit with the children.

Finally Munky has his face. In the end little M called the shots and a pink face went on the plain side.

I swore I was not going to touch jersey again in a long long time but little P has been studying the Cute Dolls book and picked out a cat for me to sew. I may hand stitch it.