[Un]Productive Saturday

Or would the proper Postmodern Punctuation be Un/Productive? Not sure. Okay, enough obscurity.

In any case, I had plans for today. I was going to get work done on my Fab Little Quilt (I shall have to show my progress on that sometime). I was going to finish editing my chapter in the Crosstalk Daycamps Manual. I was going to fold the laundry (I say that every day . . . that way one day it will get done). And then the boys decided to start playing one of their favorite games this morning - Softies in the Kingdom.

Softies in the Kingdom is one of those wonderful games entirely invented by Aaron and Andrew. It involves all the stuffed animals in the house, and it has been ongoing for over a year. Sometimes there are dramas involving lost family members that need to be reunited. There are dragon attacks, spy missions, burned down houses and destroyed communities that all require the entire relocation of the softies from room to room all through our house. Usually by the end there are bears and hippos and tigers and monkeys strewn all over the house in every room as they have become casualties in some epic battle or natural disaster, and the whole thing ends with a few lone survivors and a massive clean up operation.

Unfortunately, Aaron has determined that there are just not enough scary bad guy softies. There is one giant tiger and one dragon puppet, and other than that, there are no really evil looking bad guys. So, today Aaron decided it was my assignment to solve this problem.

I agreed, with plans of making little round black dots with horns and fangs and red glowing eyes (the three things required of the softies). And so I started cutting out pieces and fusing fabric to webbing and getting things ready.

And Aaron walked by and asked, "But where are their arms?"

So I cut out arms and started sewing again, and I got the faces fused and stitched on.

Aaron walked by again and asked, "Why don't they have any legs, Mom? They need legs."

So I cut out some legs and started sewing the horns and legs together, when I realized that if I just added some claws, then they could "roll their terrible eyes and bare their terrible teeth and wave their terrible claws". And at the very end of the day, we ended up with these:

Terrifying, aren't they? Here they are devouring my bills and looking at a takeout menu - guys this bad obviously don't cook themselves.

And here they are hanging out on a shelf, waiting for some cutsie softies to come by so they can jeer and make clever remarks.

I photographed the process of making these guys, if anyone's interested in a tutorial . . .