Your Daily Crafting Community

Hello all! I'm Froodle, also known as Cat, which is why the DW I set up to keep track of my crafting is called Cat's Chimerical Creations.

I create frankenBeanies by mix-and-matching old Beanie Babies into new and interesting shapes. I got started in February of this year, having been inspired by some very talented people on Etsy, and my first creations were two of my favourite mythical beasties, a Jackalope and a Cerberus.

I don't have a sewing machine or any specialist knowledge/experience, so they're all held together with the sort of hand-stitching that comes from a hotel repair kit and the level of skill it takes to reattach the odd button and not much else. I do think I've gotten better, but I've definitely had to go back and perform emergency repairs on several of my little dudes.

My aim when I started was to try and have one frankenBeanie a week up to the end of the year, but thanks to lockdown I passed that point a while back. My next goal was to see if I could hit 100 mix-and-match monsters by December 31st: now I'm on 98 and quietly asking myself if any of my potential ideas are "good enough" to be the Big 100, so I may need to rethink things...

I have a few Beasties that I'd like to try my hand at making - I'm a big Krampus fan and would love to make a beanie baby anti-Claus of my very own, and there's a much-abused sheet of A4 at the bottom of my bag that has various combos mapped out for future consideration - but I also love tipping out my big storage bin of babies and just going through them to see what strikes me.