Sock Frog

How to create another member of the sock monkey family, a sock frog.

Carol: I'm Carol Duvall, and before you meet our first guest I really do have an announcement to make prompted by this letter I received from viewer Anita Gunther of Creedmoor North Carolina. And Anita sent me these clippings from some catalogue that she had received, and I'm sure that many of you have seen pictures like this. A sock monkey, kit for sock monkeys, sock monkey, et cetera, et cetera. Well I would like to tell you that as far as I'm concerned they're all impostors. Now we have the real sock monkeys hanging around here. Hanging around the Carol Duvall Show all the time. Never know where we’re going to see them. Well you know that if you’ve been watching. And today, we have as our guest, the woman who really started it all. At least the revival of the sock monkey. Welcome to the show, Ann. Ann: Wonderful to be here. Carol: This is Ann Mooney, and Ann, did you have any clue? The response to our show of all. Ann: Well that’s the quite the history of the monkey evolving over the last couple of years. He's been everywhere. Carol: I know. And of course he started back, what was it about the 30’s? Ann: 30’s and 40’s. He got fairly popular and things do show, he's real popular today. Carol: Well we like to take some credit for, but I think what you’ve been doing with these socks is great. Now we have another relative we're adding to the clan today? Ann: Freda the Frog is one of our newest ones. And she's been off to a good hopping start here. Carol: But we use the same socks. Ann: Same socks for all these characters. All the characters take two socks or one pair per animal. Carol: Okay, now give us a quick tour through the directions. Ann: I’ll give you a tour of Freda here. These are the two socks, first one, this is the body section. And this top part right here are the arms or front legs. This section right here is going to be your eyeballs for Freda. And then this section here is the back legs. So you actually going to have some extra sock which is fine, because you can keep it for other projects. It’s actually one of the simpler animals to make. First we start with the eyes. If you look at this heel, you would cut it right down the middle. Okay. Carol: Right down here? Ann: Right down here, where the middle toe would be. And that section is going to be turned into two eyes. You take it, this is the half of that, that you’ve just cut. Then what you do is you take a little running stitch all the way through. Okay. See that pretty well. And then as you pull that through, you puff it out a little bit. Carol: So you got a bunch of cotton or polyfill in there, right? Ann: Yeah, the polyfill is just enough to make it bump out a little bit. And you’ll end up with an eyeball like this. Carol: Who would have guessed? Ann: Very versatile little eyeballs. The way you put this in is very similar for those of you who have made Jake the Rattlesnake. It’s very, very similar. This is the piece that you’ve cut from the first sock. and take this pin, now, you're going to fold this brown part back and just set that little eyeball right there above the white section. The top part, you fold underneath and when you pull that down, and I’ll put this one in too. It’s not all the way down, but it will give you the idea. And then you will just stitch that down in the middle and you’ll end up with, of course remember this eyeball isn't stitch up yet. Carol: Yeah, I understand. Ann: This is the basic look. And we’ll show you the finish one in the second. That gives you your face. Carol: I just want to do one thing Ann, excuse me. Familiarize me, this part is where we cut off the one sock here. Ann: Right. Now this is the body section, right over here. Carol: This is the body section from the other sock? Ann: Right. This one is where you cut the piece out these heels for the eyeballs. This part, you're not even going to use. Carol: But this body part, that’s from the first sock? Ann: From the first sock. Carol: Okay, that’s where I want to be sure. Ann: You just cut that in a little angle. Carol: Got you. Okay. Ann: First sock, body. And then the two sets of limbs and the eyes. Now we’ll go on to the limbs here. We can do this nice and quickly. Basically you're going to end up with these rectangles. Okay. Fold them inside out, stitch along the bottom of the white and up the side. Now many of these animal limbs, you have curve edges, this is not one of them. This is a nice square edge so you have kind of a frog foot. Here's one that had been sewn. And as you can see, I don’t know if you can see, but it goes very straight and up the side. Okay. You turn it inside out, fill it. Again the filling is a little different than some of the other animal limbs. The bottom section of this is very lightly filled, it's real soft. You can actually kind of pinch through. It’s not very well filled. This part is nice and firm again. That’s because you want this to be able to flatten out and make some cute toes. To make your foot, you got to pull this brown section down over the white. Carol: Okay, yes. Ann: You just pinch that about ½ inch out. Pinch it. Press it down onto the white. And then when you stitch all along here, that will make a nice right angle. And then the last part is just to put some toes through there. Okay. You’re going to do red embroidery thread all the way through. So they will look like toes. If there's little things, they look like claws. You want nice toes. Now, here we go. This is the final effect here. And what you do is the front legs are going to be sewn straight out. Okay. So that they kind of can sit Freda up. The back legs are sewn off to the sides. So you can have them sit this way or this way if you prefer. But it’s much more of a froggy look if the front legs go forward and the back legs of to the side. Kind of a cartoony version of an animal, isn't it? Carol: I have to tell you Ann, when you first sent me Freda, I put her on my kitchen counter where she has sat forever. Simply because every time I go near the kitchen I get the giggles. Ann: She's cute. Carol: Not too many people have a frog that made out of a sock sitting on their kitchen counter.