Travel Buddy Ben Portrait Puppet

 Ben is my travel buddy, and until my latest trip to Ireland he was the only person I had ever left the country with. And even though he was busy I still wanted him to come along. Solution - Packable Puppet Travel Buddy Ben!

Cyclops Puppet

Song: The Pick Up

Mike had 'flirting' listed as one of his interests, so I found a website with over a thousand pick up lines, printed them out and read them at random to my uke tune. I think the randomly chosen lines work well together - you can even hear me flipping the pages in between getting my flirt on. Awesome!

Posted via email from makemonkeylove

Make Your Own: Flair

Remember one inch round band buttons? You know, the ones we put on our backpacks in high school or wore on our bitchin' biker jackets back in the day? Yeah, I don't wear them anymore either. I've outgrown the jacket, I carry everything in my pockets, plus I'm in my thirties - proclaiming my love for The Smiths via button might be a bit pathetic. What's better than a bit pathetic?

Making your own signature buttons!

You don't even have to be in a band. One can buy kits to truly DIY if you're into that sort of thing, but I outsourced to One Inch Round.

Song: I'm a Pastry Chef

Sasha is a computer geek by day, culinary student by night. She can whip up an awesome dinner and will someday sell the best grocery store checkout line impulse buy pastries ever. This is her song. Turn it up.

Cooking with Patty

My mom has always been a crazy cooking machine. Not a holiday goes by without a full spread, four types of pie, seven varieties of cookies and a huge care package to go. To honor her, I compiled an online printable cookbook of her standard recipes for sharing with family and friends.

Song: Sweater Vest

Wyatt is interested in sweater vests - and why shouldn't he be? They're all warm and cozy and swanky and stuff. This is one of the first songs I ever recorded - I used a cheap mp3 player and did about thirty-six versions before figuring out how to minimize distortion. This is effort number thirty-seven.

Stuffie: LeoBot

Amy O. is a lovely broad who has a super cool and creative eight year old son named Leo, and whenever he visits her at work he draws the greatest pictures which Amy then hangs in her office. This stuffie is straight from Amy's bulletin board and aptly named for its designer.

Stuffie: Angry Tampon Doll!

My coworker Cathy is interested in reproductive health. I figured if anyone was going to appreciate a two foot plush angry tampon doll, it would be her.

Stuffie: Catnip Sushi

Cats love catnip. People love sushi. I think people love the idea of cats loving sushi, so made some catnip sushi cat toys. I designed this set for a birthday gift to another one of my cat lady pals.

Stuffie: Black Cat

This may just be the coolest crafting thing ever. With about forty cents worth of felt squares and embroidery thread had from the local craft store you can make stuffed...whatever! You take two pieces of felt, cut them into identical forms, sew the edges together, stuff it and add decorations like button eyes or an embroidered smile. I'm all obsessed now. Above is my first attempt at an original stuffie made for an art exchange with a cat loving pal.

Cartoon: Wonder Cat Jack

Check it out - a cartoon made from a photo in about fifteen seconds using Photoshop! Here's how it's done.

1. Open image in Photoshop and set image to RGB mode.

2. Apply poster edges effects (Filter->Artistic->Poster Edges).

3. Set brightness to 10 and contrast to 30 .

4. Apply cut out effect (Filter->Artistic->Cut Out).

5. So done!