It all started when I was looking at Pinterest with the five year old looking over my shoulder.  He saw these monsters and thought they were so great.  I had been trying to decide what to suggest that he do for his classmates for Valentine’s Day.  He has a small class this year, so I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to do something a bit more involved than usual.  When he saw these and loved them, I knew we had to do it.

I took him to pick out felt.  We just used the felt sheets that they have at the craft store.  I know wool felt would be a higher quality, but I don’t expect these to last forever, so I thought acrylic felt would work okay.  We also used tacky glue (in the gold bottle) to attach most of the felt pieces.  This enabled C1 to clue the pieces on himself and cut down on production time, since I wasn’t sewing over every piece.  I did sew over the guitars because they were cuter with strings.

I printed the patterns and then shrunk them to 80% of their size on our home printer/copier so that we could fit the front and back on one piece of felt.  I cut out all of the pieces for the monsters as well as their eyes, mouths and accessories.  Then, I laid them out for C1 and he designed each monster and glued the pieces on.  After they dried, I added the safety eyes.

We spent an evening in my sewing room with me sewing and him stuffing in which he told me all about cupid or as he calls him, the Valentine’s fairy, including that when you get shot by an arrow “you go to dinner or on a date or something with the next person that you see and you have heart eyes”.  It was a fun evening and the whole thing went pretty fast.  It took us about an hour and a half to sew the edges, stuff them, and then close up the hole left for stuffing.

I added the mustaches using a valentine’s printable I had printed out as a template because he has a thing for mustaches. I also used scraps of felt for the mouths and he added teeth as he deemed necessary.

I think the green guy looks a bit like Gumby, though the kid was quick to tell me that it couldn’t be since Gumby has two eyes. This was a super fun project and I’m excited for C1 to get to give them to his friends tomorrow! Hope you have a monstrously fun Valentine’s Day!