Scraptacular Pet Monsters and A Few Felty Things

This morning my kids were running around screaming about monsters. Jacob was playing fun (a la Monster's Inc.) and Abby took him a little to seriously and spent a solid five minutes attached to my knee being afraid of the 'cary monter' that apparently lives in my closet. Sooooo I decided to make her a pet monster of her very own to keep the 'bad monsters' away. I grabbed a scrap of fabric, folded in half and free formed a shape right on the sewing machine. Then I realized I had to sew the face on and should have done that BEFORE sewing up the body. So I ripped the stitches on 3 of the sides, folded it up and added a face, button eyes and a homespun embroidered mouth. I sewed it back up most of the way, stuffed it and hand sewed the final bit. I give you Abigail's Pet Monster:

Well if Abby had one, Jake had to have one too. So after letting him pick the colors and deciding which button for the eyes (no, mommy I want ONE eye) I put him down for his nap and drafted this guy right on the fabric. I finished sewing him closed just as Jake was waking up:

Abby's monster is about 8 inches tall and Jake's is about 10 inches tall. They were fun and pretty fast too.

Yesterday Brian told me he was thinking about making a tomato basil risotto for dinner some night and it sounded so darned good that we decided to do it tonight. He just pulls this stuff out of his head and has a good idea of what flavors will go well together (yes I know tomato basil is a no brainer, but putting it in risotto was brilliant). He made us a great risotto on the fly with some shallots sweated in olive oil and butter, rice and chicken stock. At the end of the process he added some tomato paste, fresh basil and some peas for brightness and wow! It was the best risotto I have had in a really really long time. He even loves me so much he 'over cooked' it for me (I don't like any al dente in my noodles or rice).

So in the last few weeks I have gotten out my felting kit and started to play around a bit. I went online and found a fantastic felting site and love the technique. If you were ever interested in 3 dimensional needle felting go check out http://www.feltalive.com/. Before I found the site I turned out a bowl that I later added a butterfly to:

And then a girl using pipe cleaners a armatures. I did not like the pipe cleaner method and won't use it again. It seemed like a lot of extra work for no real benefit.

Following the tutorial at http://www.learnneedlefelting.com/ I made a couple of pumpkins...these guys are about 2.5 inches tall:

So yeah, the needle felting has been fun and I think I'll try a few other things...maybe some more pumpkins since they are in season right now.