…my true love gave to me, a stocking just for my kitty!
When my Baking Buddy became a cat dad earlier this year, I knew I wanted to do something special for kitty’s first Christmas. (Yes, he already has an ornament like that.) He’s always made sure that my furkids have something for the humans and their opposable thumbs to unwrap on their behalf at Christmas, and I wanted his new addition to have the same.
I found a fun paw-shaped stocking pattern (in three different sizes!), and also some fabric on Spoonflower that looks a lot like the cat in question.
Funny story…you’d think that having three stocking sizes to choose from would be enough, but you would be wrong. The regular-sized one sounded human-sized, and the mini felt too small. And don’t get me started on the jumbo! Now I understand Goldilocks’ struggle. In the end I used the pattern for the regular-sized stocking but resized the PDF to 3/4 its original size to strike a balance.
I also left off the foot pads and toe beans. I know! Toe beans! If I had been using a solid colour for the body of the stocking I would 100% have included them (because…toe beans!), but I didn’t want to cover up the fun pattern with them. Besides, human stockings don’t include toenails…right? Help me out here.
My favourite part – or maybe second-favourite, after the orange cat fabric – is the lining. I found a couple of scrap pieces of green cuddle satin in my stash, left over from a pair of pajama pants, that were just the right size and matched the darker green on the outer fabric admirably. It gives the stocking such a luxe feeling!
I filled it up with all kinds of toys and goodies, including a gift card to the pet store for future treat purchases…and am starting to think there might have been something to the regular size after all. Right now it’s hanging at kitty’s new abode, where she’s patiently waiting until Christmas morning.
I have mixed feelings about reusable shopping bags. On the one hand, I appreciate the sustainability factor and the waste reduction, especially when some of the last plastic carrier bags provided in stores tended to rip if you even looked at them funny, rendering them unusable after the first five minutes. On the other hand, I still don’t always remember to bring a reusable bag with me, and wind up purchasing a new one which as often as not gets used as a Goodwill donation bag as soon as I get it home. (Especially those weird, crinkly, plasticky ones…) It also irks me a bit that I’m having to pay for the privilege of advertising for the store.
I’ve talked before about poochie bags, which are great for those little drugstore runs for deodorant and toothpaste, but what about bigger shopping trips? Enter the Vanessa market bag from I Think Sew.
I found the pattern really easy to follow, and quick to sew – especially once I had my first one under my belt. They’re the approximate size and shape of a “traditional” plastic shopping bag, which I find oddly comforting.
Each bag needs just a hair less than 2 metres of fabric – one for the outside, and one for the lining. For the lining, I like to purchase a king-size flat sheet: it really won’t show so the pattern or colour isn’t super-important, the fabric is typically sturdy, and it’s cheaper than buying a similarly sized cut at the fabric store.
The pattern also includes a patchwork variation which is fat quarter-friendly and not that much more difficult to make, if a little more time-consuming. I had bought so many fun prints when I was sewing masks and this is a great way to mix and match a few.
I’ve given a couple of these away as gifts, and am told they always get commented on at the store.
Is anyone else noticing a proliferation of celestial-themed everything out there lately? When I was in high school, that kind of stuff was everywhere, and I’m pretty sure my mom still has the moon-and-stars ironing board cover I picked out for her. I’d like to think I’ve matured since high school: I don’t plan my days based on my horoscope, have stopped following those “get this gift for the person in your life with that zodiac sign” guides that were a staple of every November or December issue of Seventeen and YM, and only use “Mercury is in retrograde” ironically. Lo, the fully-functioning adult, basing her life on fact rather than vague character descriptions.
All of that newfound maturity and composure was out the window when a zodiac swap was being planned on Lettuce Craft a few months back. As luck would have it, I had just finished a large-ish crafty commitment, and my fingers were itching for a new project. Surely this was written in the stars! Or…not. Due to a lack of interest, the official swap got cancelled, but the only other would-be participant reached out and asked if I was interested in doing a personal swap with her. Ooh! This was written in the stars!
My partner was a Capricorn. I’ve had a lot of Sagittariuses (Sagittarii?) in my life, but the only Capricorn I grew up with was my best friend from Gr. 3 – 10, and she just didn’t embrace the whole astrology thing. After doing a bit of online research, I was pretty well-versed in traits, colours, everything. And although we were only supposed to make one item, I wound up making two. It happened like this…
When we first exchanged questionnaires, one of my partner’s “wish” items was a zipper pouch. I was psyched, because even my rudimentary sewing skills should have been able to handle that. She went on to say she liked bright colours, as well as earth tones, but “not too much pink”.
When I got to the fabric store (any excuse for a trip there!) and found the section housing appropriately astrological prints, the designated Capricorn print was pink. Of course. That didn’t stop me buying a bit of it, as well as varying cuts of a few other prints. Nothing said I had to use the pink fabric for the entire pouch, right? Maybe I could combine them somehow. Sewing is one thing, but I’m not a quilter, a planner-of-attaching-pieces-to-other-pieces. I let my fabrics languish for a while (this is very much the approach I took to my t-shirt quilt, albeit over a shorter time frame), and started cruising the internet again.
Etsy saved the day with this fun embroidery pattern. Finally, something right in my wheelhouse! I wasted no time in downloading the PDF and transferring it to some Kona cotton I had bought a few years ago for the sole purpose of embroidering. The only thing I did a little differently was changing up the order of the stitches from what the accompanying guide recommended: the outline of the symbol was one of the first parts stitched in the guide, but I left it until the very end to ensure no other stitches (looking at you, lazy daisies!) would breach the edge of the design.
This was a complete joy to stitch. The pattern and colours were something I would normally never have done for myself or others in my immediate circle, and yet they worked together so well.
That still left the issue of my zip pouch. I found a zipper I liked and measured its length to determine how wide my fabric would need to be. From there, I cut strips of three different fabrics and sewed them into one big rectangle. Fun fact: despite much calculating on my part, my Franken-rectangle turned out to be longer than the zipper – still, better too long than too short, right? That’s what scissors are for! I decided the other side didn’t need to be as busy, and used just a single fabric for it, making sure it was the same as the outside strips on the other side to allow for some continuity at the side seam.
I cut out the word “Capricorn” and its symbol using the Silhouette and some metallic silver heat transfer vinyl just to stop the other side from being completely plain and positioned it at an angle for visual interest.
Oh, and used some elegant moon-phase fabric for the lining.
My partner said she loved everything, and I’m pretty sure my sigh of relief was heard around the world. Between reliving my horoscope-obsessed high school days and crafting something just a little bit out of my comfort zone, this was a really fun swap.
Hard to believe, isn’t it? On August 21, 2008 I hit the “Publish” button on my very first post. I wanted to post something fun to commemorate the occasion, so here is the UFO to end all UFO’s.
Many, many years ago, three things happened in glorious synchronicity. I was the thinnest I had been in my life. I had a job with an extremely casual dress code. And (it’s impossible to overstate this) graphic t-shirts were seemingly everywhere. They’ve been around forever, I know, but suddenly there were swaths of them. This resulted in my amassing a collection to rival the local stores and turning a t-shirt and flared jeans into my de facto uniform.
Times change, though, and I moved on to a job that made us dress like we were in an office. T-shirts were still weekend wear, but some of them got a little small. Some new ones came into the closet, jockeying for space with the old ones. I’m a sentimentalist with a memory for detail, and couldn’t just get rid of most of them – they all had a story! I had seen t-shirt quilts in craft books before, but that felt like a really big project. (One of them assumed the crafter might not have enough t-shirts and provided instructions for using ink-jet transfer paper to create their own specifically for the purpose of cutting them up to sew.) Still, the idea was intriguing, and I started pulling shirts from my collection and setting them aside.
Reader, I gathered 30 in all. 30! I had no idea I owned that many, or at least, I was subconsciously repressing that knowledge.
Now, where was I? Oh, yes. I pulled the shirts, arranged them in a quasi-rainbow to get a feel for the balance of colours, and promptly ignored them for…a while. What was I supposed to do with them? Where should I start? This is what I get for picking a project that didn’t come with its own pattern.
Eventually, I decided squares would be easiest. I got a 12″ square peel-and-stick floor tile from the hardware store (genius!) and used that as a template, centring it on my shirts and then running the rotary cutter around it. This method meant that I actually got two 12-inch squares from each shirt – front and back – and for a brief moment I considered assembling the plain back squares into the backing of the quilt. Thank goodness I didn’t, because I’d probably still be sewing it today. The upside is, I now have 30 ultra-soft 12-inch cleaning cloths as a nice eco-friendly alternative to paper towels. I arranged and rearranged my 30 front squares until I had a 5 x 6 grid I was happy with. I took a picture for future reference (still more genius!), and then…ignored them for a while. Yes, there’s absolutely a trend developing here.
I knew I wanted a non-stretchy fabric in between my squares to prevent, well, stretching and distortion later on, and picked up some inexpensive solid-coloured flannelette that fit the bill nicely. I cut strips 12″ long by 2″ wide out of blue flannelette, and cut 2″ squares out of pink to go at the “intersections”. I didn’t think to take any pictures of this, but I did ignore it for a while after getting my pieces cut out.
When I was ready to assemble, I started making horizontal rows of five shirts, with a 12″ x 2″ strip between each one (for a total of four blue strips per row). Does anybody want to hazard a guess as to what happened? That’s right – I sewed “filler” rows of five blue strips with four pink squares in between, to eventually go in between the t-shirt rows…and then I ignored them for a while.
It might sound like there was a lot of ignoring going on, and while that’s true to a degree, I’m grateful this wasn’t the kind of project that had to sit out in the middle of the floor or dining room table while it was being ignored. In fact, it was something that could be sewn in steps and would have been a reasonably quick project were it not for the stashing away and ignoring.
Somehow, I managed not to lose any of my rows (t-shirt or straight flannelette), and slowly…painfully slowly…would pin and sew on a row at a time here and there, as the mood struck me. The rows were about five feet long, less seam allowances but plus flannelette strips, and needed to be laid out carefully on the floor for pinning. I had to be mindful not to stretch any of the t-shirt squares (although it did happen, at least a little bit), and found it was easiest to start by lining up my pink squares in the filler rows with the blue strips in my t-shirt rows. Once I had done that, I just had to keep the t-shirt and the corresponding blue strip lined up.
Sometimes, I had help!
At long last, all six t-shirt rows and five filler rows were sewn together into one big piece that actually looked like it was supposed to. A traditional quilt includes a layer of batting in the middle and then a backing, but I’m not a traditional quilter. I bought some pink fleece for my back, figuring it could do double duty as the warm and snuggly part, too. I cut it to size and then lined it up with my quilt top (wrong sides together) and ran a zig-zag stitch all the way around to hold the layers together before adding my binding, which I also attached with a zig-zag stitch.
The other thing I didn’t do that might shock quilters is…I didn’t quilt it. I had weighed the merits of “stitch in the ditch” around my pink squares vs. going old-school and tying yarn through my layers at strategic points, and then decided against both. There’s no batting inside to move around and bunch up in one corner, and the fleece tends to stick a bit and stay put, so once this baby was bound, it was done.
My old photo ID for work featured me in this shirt:
In all, it took me just shy of nine years from the initial pulling of shirts until the final stitch. When I said UFO, I meant it! But oh my stars, was it ever worth it. It’s the perfect weight for a summer cover instead of my comforter, soft and snuggly without being too heavy. It would probably make a great picnic blanket, but I will not be risking grass stains after how long it took to get it finished. In the time since I first started gathering my shirts for this project, I’ve easily acquired that many again (and probably more)…so who knows; there may be another, hopefully quicker, t-shirt quilt in my future.
My true love gave to me: a calendar to count down daily!
Back in the summer sometime, in the course of scrolling through Etsy, I came across a panel of 24 mini-stockings meant to be made into an advent calendar. Did I need it? No. But also maybe yes. In either case, it was delivered to me in short order. If you’re curious and/or want to try this at home, kids, it’s the “Merry Christmas Mini Stocking Advent” by Makower.
The instructions included were pretty straightforward: lay your stocking panel wrong-sides-together on top of whatever fabric you want for your stocking backs, pin and cut.
Of course, I had help.
Once they were all cut out…
…I could pin each front-back pair and sew them together.
It’s funny how much smaller they are once they’re turned right side out! From here, the instructions cheerfully directed me to press the top edge under 1/4″ and stitch close to the edge, then cut ribbon into 6″ length and fold in half and stitch the ends to the inside edge to create hanging loops. There was no way those tiny little things were going to fit around the needle plate on my machine, and I wasn’t about to hand-sew a hem. Instead, while they were inside out, I pressed that top edge the recommended 1/4″, and then turned them right side out and pressed everything – including the top edge. It still created a neat finish, and I can always sew them later if I change my mind.
Rather than deal with making ribbon loops, I decided to attach them to their display rope (that’s a very technical term) using mini clothespins. Thankfully, both the clothespins and the Command Hooks supported the weight of the chocolates I had tucked inside.
I really like that each stocking’s design is oh-so-slightly different. Even the ones that look the same have small differences!
After the day’s chocolates have been, um, dispensed with, the stocking gets re-attached, toe-up, to keep the wall from looking empty as the 24th draws closer. I’m looking forward to turning this into a yearly tradition, where the only decision is what kind of treats to fill them with.
Towel Day is still a few weeks away, but if you’re looking for a more travel-friendly option that hooks conveniently onto belt loops, backpack straps, etc., I’ve got your back. I’ve talked about making this kind of hanging hand towel before, but this time I have a step-by-step guide to walk you through the process, if you’re feeling crafty and want to try it yourself.
I started by cutting out my “topper” from my fabric of choice. I came up with (using that term very loosely) the pattern by tracing around an existing towel-top I already had.
As with most sewing projects, you want to start with your right sides together before sewing your seam. The wide (bottom) part gets left open, but you’ll sew up one side, around the peak, and down the other side.
To make it easier and less bulky when it’s time to turn these right side out, I snipped off the very tip of my point. You could also trim the seam allowance all the way around if you’re concerned, but I’ve never had a problem with it.
Et voilà ! These will need to be ironed to make those edges nice and crisp. While you’re at it, fold the raw edge to the inside slightly and press it into place, too (probably 1 cm or so – just enough that you’ll be able to catch the edges when you sew it all together. I just eyeball it, because it’s pretty hard to screw these up. If these are going to be hanging as a set, you might want to work on them side-by-side to ensure you’re shortening them by the same amount).
On to the towel part! Normally, I take a single hand towel and cut it in half, but I couldn’t find a hand towel in the colour I wanted, so I opted for two facecloths instead. They’re a bit shorter side-to-side than a hand towel half would be, but work well. (Not pictured: me hacking off the thick hem at the edge that’s going to go inside my topper, because no way was my sewing machine going to get through all that.)
Fold your towel (facecloth) into thirds-ish so that it looks like it will fit inside the opening of your topper. A hand towel half would have had more overlap in the middle. Clearly, I tried to test-fit this before realizing I’d need to get rid of the one hem.
Hey, look, it fits! There’s just a little bit of extra space at the end of my topper, and that’s OK. If you’ve got more than just a little bit, try tugging on your folds gently to make your towel fill the space better. Because these were going to be hanging up as a set, I used the lines on my towel to gauge how much I had inside the topper and how much would hang down, and tried to keep both towels even. If you’re making a single one, go crazy! Well, within reason. I probably had about 2 or 3 cm of my towel up inside the topper to make sure it all got sewn together and there was no risk of it tearing out if someone were to give it a good yank. This is probably a good time to mention that if you like one side of your topper better than the other – maybe it’s got a cooler pattern placement or whatnot – figure that out now, and make that your front. I’m pretty equal-opportunity about my veggies, so however I grabbed it is how it got positioned.
Good choice making that the front, WittyChild! So many pretty colours… I sewed close enough to the folded edge of my topper that I wouldn’t have a big ol’ fabric flap flapping around and flipping up on me, but far enough away from the folded edge that both the front and back got “caught”, and I didn’t have that delightful experience of the front looking fiiiiiine while the back had a big gap where the fabric didn’t get sewn to the towel (or vice versa). If you folded up your raw edge evenly back when you were ironing all the things, you’ll be thanking yourself now. I don’t pin this into place before I start sewing; I just take it slow. Fine, I did try pinning the towel not pictured above, and broke a sewing machine needle when it hit one of the pins. There’s something to be said for my lazy-girl approach.
It’s time to add your buttons! I was so excited when I found these perfect orange specimens in my stash, but now think that I might have bought them with this project in mind and forgotten about them. Still! I knew I wanted my buttonhole to be near the point to allow maximum folding-over capability in case I found myself with a particularly chunky cupboard door handle at some point, and so I positioned my button where I wanted that buttonhole and then used a marking pencil (sewing pencil? Tailor’s pencil?) to mark where the top and bottom of the button are to determine how long the buttonhole needs to be.
Of course, if I had been just a little less excited about the buttons’ shiny orange-ness, I might have noticed that the card they came on had a handy measuring guide. Spoiler alert: my folksy home-remedy way of sizing worked perfectly here, too, since my buttons weren’t thick or irregularly-shaped.
It’s weird to think that buttonholes are just a series of glorified zig-zag stitches. If you don’t have a buttonhole function on your sewing machine or simply hate adding them to projects (I myself loathe sewing buttons on, but love making buttonholes. Somewhere, my sewing soul mate is out there, the one who hates the buttonhole function but loves sewing those suckers on), you could always use what the fabric store cheerfully calls “hook and loop tape”, but be it known that this stuff will eventually lose its grippy power and cause your towels to fall to the floor at the slightest provocation, such as staring at them too intently, and that’s just impractical and a little unsanitary.
Oh my stars and garters, cutting the buttonhole open once you’ve sewn it is the single most satisfying part of this whole project. It almost makes sewing on the buttons worth it.
After folding my point down to about where I’d want it, I used that marking pencil through the buttonhole to mark where my button is going to sit.
I might not like sewing them on, but I am endlessly pleased by the fact that the thread matches so well.
And there they are, ready to decorate, cheer, and dry! I keep both of them on door/drawer handles close to the kitchen sink for easy access when I need one, but they also work well on oven doors, dishwasher handles…
Oh, goodness. This was originally meant to be a Christmas present, but time got away from me and rushing to finish it – especially when I wasn’t 100% sure how I wanted to do the edges – would have harshed my holiday mellow. Instead, I took my time, and have something nice to show for it. (Before you ask: no, I’m not quite that much of a slacker. I finished this in early February, so I’m really only a slacker about posting it, not sewing it.)
Although my local fabric store had had other fabrics from the same collection, I had to source the apron panel online. And, OK, some of the other fabrics too, because you just never know.
This is not a picture of my panel, but of an identical one, because I apparently lacked the foresight to photograph it before merrily cutting into it.
See that black with white lettering at the very bottom? It’s actually a rectangle with several lines of type. Per the instructions, one is supposed to cut them into strips to use as neck and waist ties, but I snorted at their adorable shortness and instead bought some double-fold bias tape. Etsy now thinks I love bias tape, and won’t stop recommending it to me.
I shouldn’t knock the bias tape – it provided a beautiful finish when I used it all along the edges and held the front of the apron to the lining admirably. Using a straight stitch, no matter how slowly I went, seemed to be an exercise in futility as both sides didn’t seem to catch and I’d have to go over them. Switching to a zig-zag stitch solved this and let me edge the entire thing with a minimum of frustration (but still lots of pinning).
Once I finished edging the apron, I cut two generous lengths from what was left of the bias tape to use as waist ties, and worked with what was left after that for the neck loop – I think I had about 10 cm left after all that. I zig-zagged the raw edges of the tape for all my ties and loops before attaching them to keep them strong.
Oh, remember that extra fabric I bought “just because”? It made a perfect backing for this. Ooh, matchy!
So instead of a Christmas gift, it became a totally-unexpected Lunar New Year gift (because there’s a cow on it, which is kind of like an ox, maybe? The recipient is a city boy, so I’m not too worried).
…my true love gave to me: some fun, patterned PPE!
(If you had asked me back when I started this blog whether I’d ever use the term “PPE” here, I probably wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. Oh, the times we live in…)
My friend Jeanette is considered an essential worker, and although I would sincerely hope her employer provides her with suitable equipment when she has to be around people, I wanted to do something fun for her. A writer, she loves all things vintage-typewriter, and when I saw this fabric at Marshalls this summer, I had to pick up a third of a metre – just enough for a mask or two.
They have the coolest fabrics there, honestly (that’s where my background came from, too). Earlier in the summer, I found this beautiful zodiac fabric and made my mom an Aquarius mask, and then found Leo and Scorpio for my dad and for Mr. Gummi Bear when I found the typewriter key fabric.
The original Aquarius mask (not pictured) wasn’t long for this world. On about her third or fourth time wearing it out, she bent and re-bent the nose wire so vigorously that it broke. This is probably also a cautionary tale about using dollar-store pipe cleaners as nose wires, but what do you have to do to it to break it so quickly? She also complained about the thin elastic I used for ear loops cutting into her ears; the fact that she requested that elastic specifically was irrelevant. Could I replace the wire and elastic? I thought about the amount of unpicking required, and decided it was easier to make her a new one. And hey, if she was getting a new one for Christmas, so were the others.
I used a sturdier wire in all three of them, and the elastic is this super-soft and springy, rounded stuff I found on Etsy. Just let them try and complain about sore ears!
…my true love gave to me: a scarf for the pep rally!
Even though my friend Ricky* defected to Toronto 15+ years ago, and I see him once a year if I’m lucky, I still try to find the perfect Christmas gift to send every year. In this case, “perfect” translates loosely to “not totally impersonal, not ridiculously expensive, and not a bear to ship in terms of either packaging logistics or postage costs”. I don’t ask for much, do I?
A couple of years ago, I put together a Batman starter kit (mini Bat Signal plus some socks, soap, and mints all featuring the caped crusader’s likeness), and last year it was a box of local goodies that he wouldn’t be able to get in the Big Smoke. With everything that’s been going on this year, I opted for something nostalgic to remind him of those carefree high school days. *pause for laughter* Or at least something in our school colours.
I’ve actually made this scarf twice before, but this was my first time making it according to the original instructions and not trying to shoehorn in an extra colour. Based on a tutorial from the dearly departed Craftster, the premise is simple: choose two colours of fleece (A and B); cut eighteen 4″ by 6″ rectangles and four 6″ squares out of colour A; cut twenty 4″ by 6″ rectangles out of colour B; use nine, two, and ten of each kind of cutout to form each side of the scarf and then sew the two sides together for double-layer warmth.
I sincerely thought that cutting out all those rectangles was the most annoying/time-consuming part of this (admittedly simple) project – and then I remembered that every time you sew two of them together, you have to tie off the thread ends at both ends of the seam. Every time. For 2+10+9-1 seams per side.
To be fair, tying off the thread ends isn’t difficult or as prone to causing hand cramps as marathon fleece-cutting, but it’s the start-and-stop (especially if you leave them all until the end) that makes them a pain. By the time I was doing the second side of my scarf, I got smart, and tied my threads while I was on a conference call – it kept my hands busy, but wasn’t so distracting that I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on.
I think this should ward off the Toronto chill, no?
There was a time when I would have wrapped that scarf all around my model’s head to preserve anonymity or else digitally alter the photo up to and including decapitation; but darned if a co-ordinating mask doesn’t do the trick.
And sure, the scarf is nice and wouldn’t look out of place at the homecoming game (assuming we had a football team, which we did not), but it needed a little something extra to really complete the theme.
Perfect, right? It had the blue-and-gold scheme, and we both spent four years with the same English teacher who spent those years drilling into our heads such gems as the eight (nine? Ten? Google seems to be very divided on this) parts of speech. I think all of my grammatical neuroses can be traced back to that classroom.
In some miracle of modern postal service, his parcel arrived with a week to spare before Christmas, and I hope he’ll be able to get some use out of both, lockdown or no.
Thanks for looking….go Sabres!! 🙂
*Not his real name, but a nickname given by that same English teacher.
…my true love gave to me: a flock of sheep for the tree!
Back in the days of Craftster (RIP), I participated in the Sweat Shoppe Ornament Swap a couple of times. Basically, you’d create three or six ornaments – usually similar if not actual clones of one another – and be partnered up with three or six people to swap one for one. It was really kind of lovely because you could get your ornaments made well ahead of time and then just wait for your partners’ information. Craftster’s successor, Lettucecraft, is still in its infancy and the swap process has been a little different, and there was no SSOS this year.
Being me, I had already found a pattern I had wanted to use, and wound up making a few anyway.
I added some miniature 1:12 (I think?) lights that weren’t called for in the pattern, but took these from just being sheep to actually being Christmas sheep, and therein lies the difference.
These were really simple to make! My first one came to life during a conference call that required nothing from me apart from confirming my presence during roll call and answering the icebreaker question, and I completed the next two over a few evening phone calls with friends.
When I started making these, I couldn’t decide whether their overall vibe was “Fleece Navidad” or “Baaaaa Humbug”, but my “focus group” overwhelmingly preferred the former.
I call them a flock of sheep at the top of this post, but pity the poor collie who has to herd them: they wound up with (or are in the process of making their way to) friends in three different countries.
If the SSOS ever comes back, I might have to revisit these little guys. Love ’em!
The Witty Child 