Mr. Elephant and Miss Snake - funny pencil toppers

This weekend I was looking back on my first month of blogging and I realized that I had only shared girl projects. Since I do have a son and a daughter, boy projects are desperately needed.

So, on Saturday afternoon, while the kids were out with their bikes (finally a weekend without rain in this little corner of the world!) I took out my felt scraps and made...pencil toppers.

Why, you may ask? Because my son, now in first grade, has developed the nasty habit of chewing on his pencils and I though that if he had some pencil toppers he liked, maybe he would stop (maybe...).

Inspiration came from The Cuter Book, although I made changes to the original patterns (especially since they involved stuffing the animals and I needed to leave an opening for the pencils instead).

First came the elephant, my son's favorite animal. I cut all the pieces I needed from gray felt, but I retrospect I thing I could have cut the ears together with the face instead of having them as separate pieces).

Then I just needed to sew everything together, measuring the correct opening for the pencil. Here it is, sill missing the eyes:

I glued on the eyes and Mr. Elephant came to be:

Originally, I was only going to make Mr. Elephant, but when my son came back home for a glass of milk and went through the book, he declared he also wanted a worm (what is it with boys and worms?). I tried to explain it was a snake, not a worm, but after a while I realized it was pointless. Whatever it was, he wanted one of those.

Again, I had to wing a pattern out of the idea in the book, but Miss Snake looks bright and happy anyway.

And here they are,ready for school:

Teresa