…. but remember ladies; only dogs get mad, people get angry.

let’s move on, shall we? Have you been considering the Pocket Creature? Have you thought to yourself, ‘How twee!’ but then allowed thoughts of that little lavendar and rice sachet not to mention picking up stitches for the arms stop you? Ladies, have I got a solution for you!

Allow me to introduce a completed creature ……

the thought of setting up the old Singer to make a sachet almost spelled the end for him. But then I stroked my genius ;) and came up with this. Brilliant, no? A simple, yet elegant solution – a tea bag! Cut the tea bag as close to that mini staple as possible. Replace tea with rice. Or if you don’t have any lavender handy (did you allow your dried herb cupboard to go empty??) leave some of the tea in there for the smell good factor. Once your tea bag is full of tea and rice, refold the top and staple. A regular sized staple just fits. Violá!

~~I did think of one flaw in my plan, that turned out to not be too much of a flaw. As I was watching my tea bag/sachet spinning in my microwave, it occurred to me that the staple is metal …… metal & microwaves = sparks. In this case, nothing happened. Maybe it is too little metal?

As for the arms — the directions would have you pick up stitches. This is way too much aggravation to endure for this little frivolity. I knit an I-cord of appropriate length and threaded it through the little arm holes. Rather than weave in the ends of the I-cord, I threaded them back through to where they met the body and anchored the ‘arms’ that way.

Now that we’ve gotten the ‘clever’ out of the way, how about a crafty display?

bittersweet wreath

I noticed some bittersweet growing along the side of the road – I pulled over and had a Martha moment.

Here is that picture I’ve been promising. I finished this little coat in the nick of time — woke up this morning to some snow on the ground and a two hour late start for school. Now our Little-Man-Mo will be ready to face the elements!

If any of you are looking at the picture and wondering ‘am I seeing this right or does this dog have one eye?’ – you are not seeing things. Despite his uncanny resemblance to a little stuffed animal, this pooch of mine is a terror (at least in his own mind). Amongst the menagerie here at PurlingSwine, Mo is the only male. He takes this position very seriously. During this past summer, he decided to pick a fight with another member of our family – 80 pound Bridget. A shephard/chow mix dog that we rescued. Needless to say, he lost. His jaw was broken in four places and he ended up having to have his eye removed due to a ruptured cornea. He also seems to have some memory loss because he persists in trying to be top dog around here. Another man that will never learn! :)