The excitement in the lead up to Christmas is getting unbearable.... tears and tantrums everywhere. To occupy Eilir, I suggested that we make sock monsters. Eilir has been wanted to do this for ages, having seen the instructions in a magazine, but we hadn't yet got round to it. I selected a long stripy sock of mine that had lost its pair, but Eilir wasn't impressed ("too stripy"). He went off to his own sock draw and picked out a really scraggy pair of aquamarine coloured socks that had seen better days. I got Eilir to chalk the outlines of where we needed to cut out, and then I did the cutting because all the sharp scissors had disappeared, leaving us with a fairly blunt pair. I set up the sewing machine and demonstrated how to guide the material through. Eilir had a go, but was not keen to continue, and suggested that it would be better if I did the guiding while he controlled the foot pedal. As we were sewing Eilir got very concerned about my fingers saying "You're terrifying me!", but once he got the hang of easing the pressure on the pedal so that the needle worked slowly he was much less worried about the danger of sewing my fingers!

We stuffed our socks with cotton wool, pushing it in with our bamboo skewers for the fiddly bits (like the arms). Eilir's arms were made from the other sock in the pair, while mine were made from the fingers of my gloves, which were riddled with holes anyway (I hoped Santa had picked up on my many hints for new ones!). Next came buttons for eyes. Eilir rummaged around, and decided that buttons of similar size were more important that matching colours. In the end he found a nice brown pair that he was satisfied with. I made lots of suggestions for what he could do for the mouth, including a line of beads, but Eilir opted to use some t-shirt pens we have to draw one on. He first had a go on a piece of paper, and announced that he was "taking a risk", before drawing on his mouth. All this activity was accompanied by a soundtrack of Eilir singing festive and made up songs. Eilir was a bit concerned that the sock monsters weren't 'Christmassy' enough for the blog, so we used some mini bobble hats that were decorating the tree to finish them off.