Poppet, the accidental kitten

Say, "Hello, Poppet!"

Well, when you run out of yarn for one project and are waiting with bated breath for the next lot to arrive, there's only one thing you can do: start another project! I know, I know, I said before that I don't like doing that, and, well, I don't. But this is the exception.

See, I've been stuck at home on my butt for three (going on four) days now; I was written off work for a week because of tonsillitis. I had it two weeks ago, did my whole course of antibiotics, then the day after I went off the penicillin, it flared up again. I didn't think it could possibly be tonsillitis again, so I didn't go to the doctor's until Friday, when I just couldn't take the pain anymore. He immediately told me to take a week off work, and sent me to the pharmacy with a prescription for THREE TIMES AS MUCH PENICILLIN. You can imagine the poorly tummy that has ensued as well, which isn't very nice, but hey! I've lost half a stone! Cool.

ANYWAY, back to the topic. Since I haven't had any yarn to work on the baby project, I decided to make a phone charm, loosely based on this kitten finger puppet:

However, when I had made most of the head and attached the little phone charm strap, I realised two things:

1) If you put this on a mobile phone, it's so big that if it hits you in the head, you will probably pass out.

2) Point number 1 is completely moot since the head is actually too big to fit back through the phone charm strap, making it impossible to attach it to anything in the first place.

So I gave up that idea.

Since I'd already made a head, I decided to go ahead an attach a body, which was fairly straightforward. The most difficult bits of this project were getting the bobble toes in the right places and embroidering the little toenails. (Well, the last bit was pretty easy, just fiddly.) There was a lot of thought in this process, too, which might not be obvious: Poppet has five toes on her front paws and only four on her back paws, just like real puddy-tats.

Probably the greatest annoyance/disappointment of the project was that, due to her size, I had to use 9mm eyes to hold on the arms and legs, but the brand of eyes that I've bought seems to have very short posts, and very painful washers to attach! They're fine for just using as eyes, but not great as joints. It ended up with me this morning leaning over my son's play table with an inside-out cat, a folded up bit of cloth, and putting all my weight on the washer to get it to go on. To be honest, I'm not entirely convinced that her arms and legs won't pop off in the future, if she were to be played with. However, she's really only meant for decoration, and I've said that in her listing on Etsy. And, probably a good thing, it's prompted me to create a product guarantee for my shop, which hopefully will put customers' minds at ease.

So finally, the plug:

Poppet is available in my Etsy shop!!!

noisypitta.etsy.com