Monkey Dolls.

Tomorrow will be our three-week anniversary as a married couple, and I have to admit that we've done a pretty poor job of sharing stories about our big day here on the site. We'll try to do better.

One thing I was pretty proud of was the little dolls I made as wedding favors-slash-place cards.


I think I came up with the idea for these sometime last June during my marathon commute from Jackson Heights to Battery Park. I have a lot of time for idea-making during that time, which is a cross between a curse and a blessing, but that's a whole other post.

The idea started off a lot more complicated. Initially I was thinking it would be so cool to have little personalized dolls that would resemble each of the guests. I was actually going to individualize each one with matching hair, eyes, and clothing so people would be able to identify them by looks alone.

In the end, I probably would have needed to quit my job and knit 12 hours a day for the whole year to pull something like that off, so I designed these little guys instead. They went through a few iterations before I finally settled on this simple pattern. Each one took about an hour to make, not counting the arms, which I did in sets that generally took an hour to make and then attach. Inside, I used fish gravel to weigh them down so they would stand upright without getting knocked over by the wind. Regular cotton batting made them soft. In some of the earlier ones, before I got the cotton batting, I used shopping bags, which were soft enough but were also kind of noisy.

The cocktail umbrellas were the perfect size and made them beachy enough to be appropriate for our Sandbar wedding. To personalize them, I cut out strips of colored paper and hand-wrote everyone's names on them. The dolls held the umbrella in one hand and the name tag in the other, and they became place card holders.


Some people called them monkeys, because their arms are pretty long. I hadn't thought of that interpretation, but it's appropriate since Billy and I have been known to call each other "Monkey" from time to time.

I'm hoping that once our official photos come in, we'll have some shots of the "monkeys" in action on the wedding day. I'll be sure to post photos when they arrive.

And, if there is anyone who didn't make it to the wedding who wants their own personalized monkey, drop me a line! I'm happy to send one in the mail. We had a guest list of over 100 people, so we ended up with about 50 extras. Plenty to go around!