First let me note: I am not a crafty person. I was the girl who always used too much glue and too much glitter in art class. Over the past few years, however, I've discovered that I have an aptitude for making creatures out of socks, inspired by John Murphy's Stupid Sock Creatures. There are definitely cloth books, and perhaps even books made out of socks, but a sock creature book seemed like quite an unusual edition indeed.



Two white socks and a sewing box get me on my way.



One sock gets cut up to become the body: the other is mangled so that I can two arms and a tail from the material.



I used a scrap from the mangled sock to test out different pens. They all showed up better than I had thought, but the best was definitely a black, fine point scrapbooking pen that showed up darker and more clearly than the other pens.



Here is the assembled creature, unstuffed, with the pen prior to the inscribing. I wrote a little poem to put on the monster:

Little monsters run and play
At shadow noon and dark of day
They sing their joys
To girls and boys
In dreams and shade
Through lights and fade
With laughs and sighs
And button eyes

Front:

And back:

Stuffing the monster took little time and he was quickly finished off with a jaunty red ribbon and two button eyes. Since I always either give the monsters away or sell them, usually I wait and let the new owner name them. In this case, however, how could I not call him Unusual Ed?