I am taking a break from blankets today to introduce you to Annie! My new apple friend. She is super sweet and so loving.
One of the things one must accept in marriage is the broad landscape of what constitutes love language. Pete's is 'giving Jellycats and/or chocolate', among other everyday things like driving me wherever I need to be because I hate driving, and coming along when I want company on a walk.
Obviously I love this situation a ton, but the Jellycat thing has gotten a little out of hand. We have a LOT of them now. I actually have to be careful about walking him past a store that stocks them, because he cannot help himself. This is hard because I also have a terrible weakness for them. A few weeks ago, for example, we were both magnetically drawn into a store with a shelf supporting the weight of a wombat, and I wanted to buy it SO BAD, and insisted we must not do so under any circumstances, and we left without him. Then on Valentine's day I found my very special wombat waiting for me at the end of a trail of square chocolates because wombats poop in cubes.
Be still my heart...
Anyway, back to Annie. I eat a couple of apples every day and Pete can't go long without buying me something special, so: Jellycat apple. Fair enough: not complaining about that! But Annie had a problem, and one I've never stumbled across before with this brand.
It was her cute corduroy legs.
And her equally cute corduroy stem.
They smell like burnt petroleum, or a dead tire in a heatwave.
If you're reading this you're probably to some degree a fabric nerd, so you may have come across this issue before. It usually happens with a cheap fabric that insists it's a cotton, or sometimes it's a stretch polyester blend. It can be random, too. I have been burned by fabrics that smell fine in the store but after you wash them, they have this headache-inducing odor that does not go away ever. And it's pervasive, getting into any other textiles stored nearby.
Regardless of how Jellycat came to use such a suspect corduroy, something had to happen for Annie's well-being and mine. While I figured out what that might be, she sat on the arm of my favourite chair, safely away from the other Jellycats, where I could pet the part of her that wasn't stinky so she wouldn't feel totally rejected.
I mean OBviously that wasn't sustainable.
Finally, she and I came up with the answer.
THE RIPPER.
My mother's ripper, actually, which gave me the emotional fortitude to go in and shred the stitches on a $30 toy.
Doing this surgery gave me an even deeper appreciation for Jellycat quality. The legs were tucked into holes in Annie's body, but the fabric allowance on the depth of those cavities is so generous I will not have to stitch them shut unless I someday allow a child under three to gnaw on her.
Seriously: still smiling. What a perfect patient!
The stem was not embedded in a seam at all, but stitched into a deep depression in the top of her head, separate from her leaf, which was unaffected.
And the thread was white, so once I managed to work it out into view it was easy to see what I should pull and what I should not. I used tweezers for the final part of the surgery.
Annie was lovely throughout, and afterward she was so happy to be able to meet her colleagues properly.
That's William, my wombat, on the right. The bee on the left is one of two on our New York Times Spelling Bee team, though I can't say she's helped me win, ever. (I'd like to be able to convince somebody that *my* love language is letting Pete win at Spelling Bee every day, and that it doesn't just happen because he's so much better at it than I am, but here we are.)
Annie is so happy to be footloose and fancy free now. She and Wendy, the bunny macaron Pete gave me ages ago, are having great chats about having no legs.
And she and Squash, the squash Pete gave me also ages ago, are giggly over their plan to infiltrate next year's Christmas display as baubles.
All in all, the surgery was a massive success, leaving Annie free to live her best life.
We both hope you're living your best life, too. Thanks for dropping by today and we'll see you next weekend!
