Sock Snowmen - Tutorial

The snow has been melting today, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make a snowman! Today we listened to this song and made these sock snow men. They were fun and easy, and I thought I would share so you can make them with your own little people.

What You Need:

 

-a white sock (all white is best, but it’s okay if the toe and heel have another color – they won’t show in the end)

-batting to stuff your snowman

-a white rubberband

-white embroidery floss

-a ribbon (any color – for the snowman’s scarf)

-pipe cleaner (orange for a carrot nose – and you could use brown for the arms, but I only had Halloween colors left over from our spider project – it was orange, purple, or electric green – I think you’ll agree I made the right choice)

-black felt (for the top hat!)

-black beads (for the eyes and mouth, and you could use some for buttons – I didn’t have enough big ones, and the little ones ended up in the carpet...thanks to my little helpers)

-black thread and a needle (I know I have white thread in this picture, but I wasn’t thinking straight, and I ended up using black)

How to Make It:

 

1.) Gather the tow of the sock and wrap a rubber band around it. (I put a rock in the toe before I wrapped the rubber band around - Here’s where I would have done something differently – instead of sticking a rock in the toe of the sock like I did - to add weight to the bottom so the snowman would stand up alone - I would have just gathered the toe of the sock and put beans in with the batting inside the bottom section of the snowman. The rock turned out not to be stable enough, and you have to move it around a bunch to make the snowman stand up right)

 

Turn the sock inside out, so the bottom looks puckered in.

 

 

 

 

2.) This is the part where I would have put a bunch of beans in the bottom of the sock, and then started with the batting. Stuff the sock with batting (great job to assign to your little einstein!) – just keep going until you have enough to make a big ball at the bottom. Then tie off the bottom with some embroidery floss. After the first one, I got smart and twisted off a part (like making balloon animals) and had Little E hold it while I tied the floss. That seemed to work better.

 

Stuff some more batting in, tie that part off, then stuff some more and tie off the head. When you’re done making all the balls, cut off the rest of the sock. It will look like your snowman has an 80’s hair do, but don’t worry, you’re going to cover it with a top hat.

   

 

 

3.) Now for the hat. Cut a circle out of the black felt, then cut a circle out of the middle of the big circle. You should have a donut looking piece, and then the “donut hole.” Now cut a strip that is the same length as the circumference of the inside circle. You don’t actually have to measure the circumference – I just cut a strip and then rolled it around the small circle and made sure it was about the same size.

 

The donut part is the brim of the hat, the strip will be the columnar part of the hat, and the small circle will be the top of the hat.

 

Start with the brim (the donut part) and the strip. Put the donut part over the funky 80’s do on your snowman, and then start in the back of your snowman sewing the strip to the brim, as in the picture. You’re going to do a back stitch to attach the hat to the brim and the head of the snowman, all at once. To start, tie a knot in the end of your thread, and go through the sock on the head of the snowman, then up through the brim. When you go back down, go through the strip of the hat, through the sock, and back up through the brim. do this all the way around the hat.

 

After you get to the back of the hat, use the same stitch to sew the strip shut in the back of the hat, then use the same stitch again to sew the small circle on top of the hat. I even let Little E pull the needle through (on a few stitches – it was faster for me to just do it myself...)

 

You can also just hot glue all the hat pieces together and then hotglue the hat onto the snowman, but I think sewing is a little more durable, and I know my kids are going to be playing with these things.

 

4.) Now you can stitch on the eyes. I sewed through the sock where I wanted to put the eye, then tied the thread around the sock (it was easier than tying knots in the thread), then I threaded the bead on the needle, and went back through the bead in the same direction again. Then I stitched through the snowman’s face to the other place I wanted an eye, and threaded that bead on. I did the same thing for each of the smaller beads that I used for the mouth.

 

5.) For the scarf, just tie a piece of ribbon/fabric around the snowman’s neck. I attached the scarf with a little stitch, as you can see in the picture.

 

 

 

 

 

6.) For the nose, I used a piece of orange pipe cleaner and shoved it through the sock where I wanted the nose. It took a little convincing, but eventually I got it through. Then I bent the end of the pipe cleaner that was inside the snowman to make a sort of anchor so the pipe cleaner couldn’t be pulled out. Trim the nose to the desire length. I did the same thing with the arms, and shaped the ends of the arms into little hands.

 

 

There you have it. This is the first time I’ve posted a tutorial on my blog, so I’m sorry if it isn’t very coherent. I usually just post recipes. That’s not as hard. If you find this tutorial useful and make some snowmen yourself with your kiddos, please link up in the comments! I would love to read what you’re doing with your little ones!

Cooking Day

A while ago I read this article that was featured in Simple Mom’s weekend links. I was really inspired by the article. When Little E was a baby, I used to let him do everything with me. Laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning, you name it, he was “helping” – and loving it. I have a million excuses why I haven’t been letting my kids help in the past year or so – two is harder than one, life got crazy, we moved three times, etc – but none of them are very good reasons for stunting my children’s growth and development.

The article from the Kitchen Stewardship blog was kind of like a slap in the face for me and the motivator I needed to start letting my kids experience the real world through play. Remember when we were kids and work was play? I’d like to capitalize on that right now, while my kids are still young. I feel like I may have soured the opportunity though – it takes more than I thought it would to get Little E (who is only 3 1/2) to empty the dishwasher. And Baby E just likes to take stuff out and throw it on the floor. When Little E was a baby, he would actually help – most of the time. Baby E’s desire to throw stuff around a destroy things I explain with the fact that I haven’t let her so much as touch anything in the kitchen since she was practically born (the moving around had a little to do with that).

As you can see from our pictures, we’ve been trying to remedy that mistake. The kids enjoy helping out a lot more (we’ve got a long way to go!) and I am feeling like their ability to “play” doing “real world” things is making a difference. Little E already knows how to cut vegetables and hold a knife and the veggie so that he doesn’t cut himself. Sure, the chunks come out a little uneven, and the cuts are more often crooked than straight – but Little E is learning how to cook (and not just Mac & Cheese!) when he is 3. By the time he’s 30, he’ll be a gourmet chef, right?

Well, making gourmet chefs is not our goal as parents – but raising children who aren’t afraid to try “real world” things is. We want to expose them to all the wonderful things life has to offer, and not just “shield” them by letting them play with “fake” or “pretend” things – we want them to get down and dirty and figure things out.

Like the article at Kitchen Stewardship said: “Let us also live real lives and teach our children how to do real work, trusting that they, too, were created for more than just pretending.”