Humpty be Crackin’

In the end, Humpty got his limbs.

I should explain why I was making a Humpty doll for my little neighbor friend.

It is because of this:

link in case embedded video doesn’t work: http://youtu.be/r5idILB-vts

The little guy loves to watch clips on youtube.  He knows you can play them over and over and he knows that the little pictures on the sides are other videos you can watch. So, he has a fair amount of control over what he watches, which he enjoys.   It’s nice for the adults, too, because we can ask Kecky questions about the videos before we replay them “What happened to Humpty?”  “Do they fix Humpty?”  You know, the sort of stuff that studies show encourages better comprehension of what they are observing.

Also, as soon as Kecky isn’t paying much attention to the videos, its easy to redirect him to more active play.  If we watch Dora the Explorer or other shows, Kecky seems to feel obliged to hang in there until Dora reaches her final destination even though you can see the little guy is itching to get off the couch and run around.  Not a problem he has with books, by the way, which he will listen to for quite long stretches.

One day, after watching the Humpty video, Keckers turned his wee face to me and said “I want to fall.  I want to crack.”  Which, on top of being the funniest utterance ever, led to this whole game where I draw a crack on Keck’s forehead, Kecky and I sit on something, sing the song from the video, “fall” off of what we’re sitting on, and then lay flat on the floor laughing until we get up and find something else to fall off of.

So, Keckers was turning three and I wanted to make him something, what better than a Humpty Dumpty doll?

Humpty is 100% cotton, his body is made from canvas, which had his face and crack painted on with fabric paint.  The canvas seemed likely to fray, so I cut it large enough to incorporate a 1/2-inch seam and I zig-zag stitched the edges before joining the halves.

Humpty’s patchwork pants are attached to the canvas base and contain batting.  All three layers of the pants were quilted.

The legs, which were giving me trouble at first, finally looked right when I look Cheryl‘s advice and made them extra long.  The limbs are basically just tubes of quilter’s cotton.  When it came time to sew everything together (following the construction scheme laid out for the cat pattern in Denyse Schmidt Quilts) I went over the bits where the limbs attached a bunch of times.

Which was a good call because when Keckers unwrapped Humpty…

 

He took a second to look at him, exclaimed, “It’s HUMPTY!”  Then Kecky took Humpty by the arm, whipped him to the ground, laughed, and said, “Poor Humpty.”  Next, Keckers looked at me and in all seriousness said, “Rossie, Humpty be crackin’!”

Holy crap that kid is funny.