It’s the evening of December the 23rd and right now, at this moment , my holiday spirit is pretty much a solid Bah-Humbug. A friend has a new baby and she is charming and precocious and clearly miles ahead of every other baby anywhere, and I am making her a stuffed elephant for Christmas.
I buy the patterns for my stuffed animals off of Etsy – Why support some multinational corporation like Butterick or Simplicity when you can support a creative individual? That’s how my thinking goes, anyway, but frustratingly often, after I cut out the pattern pieces and have used up every square inch of my fabric, I find that I have to redesign the whole flaming animal on the fly.
The picture on the pattern I picked out was pretty cute, so I gave the elephant a very long name, and even wrote a little story about why elephants have such long names, and how my Valentina Euphrasia Trumpet-toes McGonagall got hers –
This blamed elephant only has four legs, but as of this evening I’ve sewn on seven feet and redesigned a trunk AND a purple elephant posterior. Mr Tabubil, my dear husband and helpmeet, thinks the situation’s hysterical. I’ve no comment. But my story has a brand new chapter. It’s called “Valentina the Elephant visits the La Brea Tar Pits.” It’s very short and extremely educational.