Sock Giraffe

In the last fortnight I received a request from a friend to try and make a sock giraffe as she wanted to give one as a baby gift. So I turned to my trusty friend Google for some inspiration as I have learnt that there are a lot of us sock crafters around and it is a good way of seeing what other people have done.

Flicking through the pictures on Google Images I soon came across one that I particularly liked. When I clicked through to the website it came from it turned out that the creator of the sock giraffe had actually posted a tutorial online! Yay for me! So I followed their instructions (which can be found here) and made a couple of sock giraffes.

I made two different giraffes to start with from two different sizes of socks, one from a regular ‘crew’ sized sock and one from a pair of ‘knee-high’ socks. I found the process of making them to be a little more challenging than making a monkey or owl, due simply to the nature of the neck and how it is attached. Getting the neck to sit correctly under the sewing machine was a bit fussy, but once it was done it was well worth the effort. Turning the neck and stuffing the head and neck were also fussy as it was only a small opening which made things more difficult.

The finished giraffes turned out well, and I like the long neck of the giraffe that I was able to achieve using the knee high socks. In the future though, I will not make the neck quite so long as the weight of the head makes it so that the neck doesn’t actually stay upright without being propped (or in the case of when I was taking the photo, pinned). I also modified the face to what I liked, as well as the horns and ears - so it is a bit different from the tutorial.

I liked the giraffe enough that I decided to go looking for giraffe print socks online – it turns out that though you can find them, they aren’t available in stock in most places and the places that do have them don’t ship to Australia (at least not at a feasible cost)! This makes me very sad. Oh well, the cheetah print socks I used for these two seemed to work well, and cheetah print socks are available almost everywhere (though I can’t figure out for the life of me why people like cheetah print so much). But, if you come across any giraffe print socks – let me know where I can get them!