Boogers on the Wall

This week I made some fabric monsters with my little monsters. And it wasn’t even scary.

Sometimes I take on projects with my kids and I think that I am going to scream by the end. It tries my patience.

This time I did some prep work to make it easy and less stressful.

We used the pattern from this blog as a base for our monsters.

We made more than 60 of these recently at a church service activity I was in charge of with the women in my neighborhood. We are donating them to a local children’s hospital.

My kids came to the first part of that activity (before grandma came and got them and rescued me from their over-energetic, run-around-the-gym personalities.) I let each of them make one monster that night. And even though I told them we were going to give them to some kids who were sick, they didn’t want to part with their new furry friends. (My 3-year-old kept fake coughing, trying to convince me that he was sick.)

That’s when I promised to make some of our own at home…that they could keep.

I cut out the monsters from fleece ahead of time. I got ¼ of a yard of several different colors. The fabric was so wide that I was able to make three monsters out of each color. We used white, green, red, yellow and purple.

Then I sewed them mostly shut – I left a small opening to stuff the monsters. I did all of this before even enlisting the help of my boys.

They got to help stuff the monsters. I had a medium size bag of stuffing and we used it all on our 15 monsters. The boys loved pulling the fluff apart and shoving it inside their new friends.

They each got to pick a specific monster that was “theirs.”

After we stuffed them all we called it quits for the day. Then, when they were at school and napping a couple of days later, I sewed all the monsters shut.

That night we took the fleece scraps from when I cut out the monsters, added some black felt, and started dreaming up face shapes for our monster crew.

We giggled as we added crazy teeth, long tongues and wacky eyes to our lot.

I let the kids help for a little while then shipped them off to get ready for bed with dad while I finished working on the rest of the faceless monsters.

They each turned out so cute and so different. Just like at my church activity. Each of the 63 monsters we made for that activity was unique. I couldn’t help it I had to take a picture of them all.

I love them.

If any of you get the urge to make some of your own, send me a picture of how yours turn out!

Here are the four designed by my boys.

I couldn’t resist making a few female monsters. The one in the middle is my baby girl’s monster.

Here they are all on our toy bench. They seriously are my new favorite Halloween decoration.