monkey business

I haven't had many crafty doings to show you lately (though I am embroidering my little heart out behind the scenes!) but here is a sock monkey I made this week. He has survived a savage attack from Lola Tombola, criminal mastermind, but has decided it would be safer to go and live in Aberdeen with Graham's niece who has a birthday coming up this weekend. I made a sock monkey for the birthday girl's sister a couple of years ago and got a special request for one this year. I hope she likes him.

This is the fourth sock monkey I've made (I use the instructions here, with a little bit of variation depending on the finer qualities of the socks, you know!) and I always end up loving them. They are just so old school and cute. You can see a couple of my other sock monkeys here and here, but if you want to see a rather more impressive sock monkey, look at this Hi-De-Hi monkey by Siansburys. How amazing?!

In other news (I'm slipping this in at the end of the post to spare a few blushes, but my main purpose is to name and shame myself really) Graham and I bit the bullet and weighed ourselves this week. We were very good for a very long time a while back and I felt great. Then Christmas 2008 struck and I pretty much didn't stop eating for 13 months. I had already decided something had to be done (I can't keep up with washing the handful of clothes I can squeeze into) but the scales were the horrific blow I needed to kick me up the frankly gigantic behind. I have put on thirty (30, three zero, not thirteen, but thirty, yes 30) pounds. That's over two stone, people! I have decided I want to lose it and am setting my 30th birthday as my target. That's about eleven weeks away. To be honest, I am quite realistic and I don't mind if I haven't lost all thirty pounds by then, but I do at least want to be well on the way and feeling good about myself and not like an old lady who can't climb the hill to her front door without wheezing loudly enough to wake the neighbours. I am declaring this publicly here as a little motivation to myself - I will be very ashamed if I've wittered on like this and then don't make the changes I'm promising to. I won't be mentioning this again (I don't want my blog to be about weight loss when there's so much crafty greatness to be blogging about) but I have put a weight loss ticker way down at the bottom of the page, which I will update with my progress. If it doesn't move soon, feel free to give me a severe telling off :)