Softy Pigs (Miyako Kanamori: Part 3)

I posted earlier about Miyako Kanamori's Sock and Glove (Creating Charming Softy Friends from Cast-off Socks and Gloves). As you can tell from the title, this very sweet and simple book has easy patterns for fashioning stuffed animals from gloves and socks. A few of the patterns, such as the fish we posted about, are suitable for socks that have lost their mates. However, most of the patterns require a pair of socks that are in good condition (including the heels and toes). We don't often have extra pairs of socks in good condition, but we do often have t-shirts and sweaters that get a few holes, snags, tears or worn through the elbows. Could you just cut sock shapes out of the fabric and use the arms for the bits of the pattern calling for a tube shape?


A beautiful pink pullover which accidentally wound up in the dryer + a stripey long sleeve t-shirt with worn elbows provided the opportunity to try it out and yielded 4 pigs and 2 pig t-shirts. The first pig went to a birthday party and was promptly named Rocco and given a flowered kimono to wear over his striped shirt. The remaining 3 are currently waiting for a big bad wolf to join them (although, they've been waiting for more than a year now).



Here are the 3 little pigs: Karate Pig, Friendly Pig and Farmer Pig.



Rocco.



The original dog I tried from the book. A tip if you try these patterns: overstuff. The stuffing gets compacted really quickly.


This concludes my Kanamori series!

Huffy

Miyako Kanamori: Part 2

From Orion Books, an animated series starrring Miyako Kanamori's creatures.

Sock fish

Miyako Kanamori: Part 1


Sock and Glove: Creating Charming Softy Friends from Cast-off Socks and Gloves by Miyako Kanamori is a very good book! (Phew...out of breath from that last sentence.) As you might guess from its descriptive title, this book gives you patterns for making little softies from socks (mostly long socks) and gloves. The patterns are quite simple and you can use a machine or hand sewing for the projects. This is a good book for your bookshelf; it has a lot of easy, fun projects.


One little note: most of the patterns involve a pair of gloves or a pair of socks, and they need to be in fairly good condition (toes and heels are often part of the pattern), so this won't help you use old socks. However, all you need is a pack of work socks and you're off. The gloves in the book are mostly rough work/gardening gloves, which you can find in Vancouver for about $2, so that's quite economical.

Anyway, we'd like to show a couple of projects from the book, beginning with sock fish. These fish were not the very cutest project, but they are very simple, quick, and they only use one sock (and they are great for baby socks, which often lose their mate and remain in good condition even after wear).

Kanamori's fish has a button eye and uses a sock with a contrasting colour for the toe, which looks very cute. However, we didn't have any socks like that, so we tried adding a little blanket stitching to separate the head from the body (and to make a little fin). Because these are for babies, we stitched on felt eyes which are safer.