Wilbert

Benjamin recently finished an "after potty chart."  He has been potty-trained for a long time, but the whole flush-underpants-pants-wash thing does not happen.  He usually runs to the toilet, and when my back is turned, tip-toes outside bare-bunned before I can do anything.  He's going to pre-school on Tuesday, so I thought (before he really frightens the little girls in his class) it was a good time to get this thing under control!  

His reward for finishing his chart was going to be a pair of cowboy boots, but when I saw the prices, I thought a hobby horse would be more economical.  And it was!  I only ended up spending about $3 (for the stick).  The rest was made from odds and ends I already had.  

Wilbert, the DIY Hobby Horse

Meet Wilbert (Benjamin thought of his brilliant name).  He was pretty fun to make.  I couldn't find a tutorial for one I liked, so I just looked at a bunch of pictures and used what I had here to make him.  Along the way, I thought "I should be making a tutorial for this."  However, I'm just not good at taking pictures while doing projects.  In fact, my children are lucky if they get fed and put to bed when I'm working on a project.

My work station looks like this right now.

So, because there's no picture tutorial, I'll tell how I did a few things that took me a little while to figure out.

• The eyes are fabric, pasted on with my glue-gun
• The ears are kakhi pant fabric and burlap. I made a pattern that looked like this (look, I even took a picture of it for you). 

• I sewed them together insideout, flipped them right-side out, then sewed along the bottom. They took the right shape on their own.
• To attach them to the sock, I cut a line on each side of the heel, stuck the bottom of the ears in, and sewed them in inside out.  
• For the hair, I wound some yarn around and around something that gave me the right side of loop, then I sewed it on a long skinny piece of fabric in batches (does that make sense at all?).  Then I cut a long line on the top of the sock, and sewed the whole thing in (again, with the sock inside out, and all the "hair" inside the sock, being careful that the other piece of fabric didn't show.  It also would have worked fine to glue the yarn to the fabric, but sewing seemed easier.

Well, that was probably completely un-helpful without pictures explaining what I meant.  It was a half-day project that was cheap, and turned out fun.  And if Benjamin learned the lessons his chart was supposed to teach him, then it was well worth it!