Herman the German (but it's a cake!) and a WEIRD coincidence...

You've heard of it, right? If you haven't, then by the time you've read this, my poor uneducated reader, you will! (Please don't let that put you off.)

Yes, yes, you're perfectly correct. It's the plastic container of bubbling dough, passed on by a desperate acquaintance... the friendship cake... it's Herman the German.

But, I hear you say, I thought he was your monkey?

He is!!

And here comes the weird coincidence. I was the only one on camp who to my knowledge had heard of the HtG cake version. And I wanted to call my monkey Horatio. Peer pressure forced me to call him Herman instead. And Herman rhymes with German so I suppose that was inevitable.

But that name was not original. It was already the name of a gloopy mixture.

Yet when I protested that I did not want my monkey named after a cake, no one believed me...

And weirdly enough, Herman the German was re-invented!!... as the name of a monkey.

My theory was that someone had heard of the cake, and so the name was floating around in the back of their mind, and popped up when I was looking for a nice name beginning with H.

But a-a-anyway, let's move onto the cake.

Right now I am wavering between abusing Herman with cynical wrath... or gushing about him in ecstatic praise.

On the one hand, we have been eating barely anything else all week.

On the other, he tastes rather... tasty.

Oh, please, you have to have heard of him! No? He's basically a mixture of sour dough handed to you in a container by a friend, usually desperate to get rid of him. You look after him for ten days (during which you become very fond of him), stir him to keep him producing bubbles, feed him milk and sugar and lumps of apple and cinammon and... well, numerous other things, and then at last, divide him into four and bake one of his babies.

It sounds rather gruesome, but it has a gorgeous end result.

The smell as it comes out of the oven... it's glorious. Really.

The other three parts, you pass on to your most devoted friends... or by the time you've finished with Hermie - anyone you can persuade to carry him away.

We've only just got rid of ours, after about four weeks worth of Herman clones. I'm rather sorry to see him go - he'd almost become a fixture - but on the other hand, I was beginning to worry about getting too fat.

So Herman got passed on to the populace.

I thought we were finally rid of him.

I then turned up at our Young People's Fellowship one evening, and guess what was on the snacks table? Slices of Herman.

And... wait for it, it gets much, much worse... My poor brainwashed (or Herman-washed) mother, told me this morning that she wanted to get him back from the friend we'd bestowed him to, so that she could pass it on to some interested family members!!

Those family members being people I will see in a relatively short amount of time...

I'm being haunted by Herman. I'd prefer the monkey.

A Tangle of Things... and Herman the German

Well hello again everybody!
I know its been rather a while since I last posted... I have a multimillion reasons for my neglect which I won't bore you with.
I'll instead get to the good stuff!
I spent the Easter Holidays... in Shropshire... on Easter Camp!!
We stayed at a youth hostel, in a tiny little village. It was really lovely, the wild, sweeping countryside... apart from a six chimney power station belching smoke on the other side of the hill. That's England for you.
The building was an old art-school, so with big rambling Victorian rooms and a huge staircase that you simply have to take the stairs three at time and whoop as you run down them...
Okay. I simply have to.
Well, the week was just amazing, as it always is!
We studied the Armour of God in the main talks, with informal discussion groups, bible studies in the morning, and prayer times for campers before breakfast - so it was pretty intensive!We learnt so much and had such an incredibly encouraging time.
We also went caving, did archery and the highlight of the week - laser paintballing.
AND - this is the most important part of the entire week, I think...
this little guy was made:

MEET: HERMAN THE GERMAN, sock monkey!!!!!
I need to add here that I am not responsible for his name. It was a unanimous decision that had nothing to do with me. I wanted him to be called Horatio, actually. But you know how once somethings been named, you just can't call it anything else? In this case, it was very annoying! But now it's stuck!

This was Herman in the making...

And now, of course, you'll want to know how to make one!!
You see I know these things...

 Sock Number 1

This is an absolutely awful picture diagram of how to make one. I'm sorry its only little but you can kind of get the idea I hope? The tiny little words in the bottom right hand corner read 'turn inside out before sewing', so basically turn the sock inside out before sewing and then back the right way to stuff it before sewing it up.

Sock Number 2

You can also customise your monkey! In this picture I demonstrated how you can chop off the ends of the paws to make ears, but you don't necessarily have to do this. Herman has bits of fluff for his ears. Another tip is putting a pipe cleaner in the tail, arms or legs, so that you can bend them as you want!

The afternoon we made these monkeys on camp, it was a girls only session, however the boys invaded and decided that they wanted to make one too...

... this unmentionable guy made a - I won't even call it a monkey - out of an old sock he had been wearing for the first part of the week. I was only told this after I had been admiring it. I then lost quite a chunk of my regard for it as I'm sure you'll understand.




      However, the result was this:

He was stuffed with plastic bags and his name is Spoon (for reasons I won't go into). Pretty impressive for a boy's sewing!

 Here displayed are some other colourful relations posing with Herman. There were just under twenty altogether, but I didn't get a picture of them all.

Anyway, unless you think that all we spent time on camp doing was making sock monkeys, I'll just add that this post was supposed to be sock monkey co-orientated!

They are so awesome though, aren't they!

Don't worry, I'll get over this obsession soon.

If you know of any other sock-thing ideas, please comment! And if you've made any sock monkeys please also comment, I'd love to see them!

I think I'm going to experiment making a monkey out of a baby sock, and turn it into a key ring or something. I made one for my sister with a age four to five sock and it only took me about forty minutes or so, they are so easy to make and so effective! Ah, I love these things :)