Having spent 40 years of my life in the Midwest, I've had enough snowman-building to last me a lifetime, Plus, the raw materials are a little hard to come by where I live now.
But there's this movie that Disney released around Christmastime. And unless you are living under a rock, you've probably heard about it/seen it 32 bajillion times/can sing every word of the soundtrack/have regular nightmares about it.
We aren't immune here in sunny Southern California for several reasons:
1. I have a twelve-year-old daughter. Disney movies about princesses are still "cool."
2. My best friend has a daughter who LOVES Frozen. Specifically "Snowman."
3. My nineteen-year-old daughter had her heart set on giving the aforementioned moppet a stuffed Olaf for her 2nd birthday.
This shouldn't be a problem, right? I mean, Southern California! This is the birthplace of all things Disney. The home of Disneyland. There's a Disney store on every corner. Finding a stuffed Olaf was going to be a piece of cake.
Yeah. No.
The Frozen merchandise in every Disney Store we went to could be displayed on a two-shelf end cap and counted on one hand.
A swimming suit. (Seriously? A Frozen swimming suit? Anyone else shaking your head?)
A winter coat. (Okay. That one, I get.)
Flip-flops. (No words.)
A plate and bowl set with the good guy and his reindeer. (I don't remember their names, and I'm not ABOUT to stick the movie in to find out.)
Store workers said it's been that way for months. Apparently the Disney Elsa cheap dress-up dress made out of crappy itchy fabric is selling on Ebay for thousands of dollars.
We checked J.C. Penney, Target, Wal-Mart, Amazon. Nothing to be had until the latter part of June.
My daughter was so bummed. And even though she's nineteen and lives on her own and is technically a "grown-up," I really wanted to "fix" this for her.
So as I was trying to figure out what to do to help, my eyes fell on this--still sitting on the dining room table from poodle-skirt making a couple of months ago.
Owning this thing gets me into so much trouble, let me tell you. I think that because I have it, that makes me competent to actually use it.
And I thought, Surely I'm not the only one needing a stuffed Olaf. Surely some super-mom has figured out how to make one of these guys and 50 thousand people have pinned it to their Pinterest pages.
So I Googled "free stuffed Olaf pattern." Can I tell you how much I love...and hate Google?
Because it came up with this
Anyway, I just want to give a shout out to this unbelievable mom at Crafty Creations. I must confess. I normally don't read blogs like hers. They make me feel bad about myself. I cannot throw ANYTHING together while I'm making dinner (not even dinner), let alone a stuffed Olaf. But her post made it look possible, so I took a deep breath, printed off the patterns, and headed to Jo-Ann's.
Now I'm a realist. So if the Crafty Creations Unbelievable Mom could make an Olaf in the time it took to make dinner, I took 1 hour and multiplied it by 24 to get the ETA of when my Olaf would be finished.
Okay. I am just going to say this right now. Nothing has made me a supporter of Fair Trade Certified quite the way that sewing my own stuffed animal has. I don't care if those folks in China do have an assembly line to make their Olafs. They aren't getting paid nearly enough.
I also now know why kids only had one or two toys to their names before the birth of sweatshops and outsourcing.
But with a little bit of pattern tweaking, a lot of patience, a good seam-ripper to fix the screw ups, and more hours than I'm comfortable admitting, I think we got something that will pass if you squint hard enough. Or if you are two.
Real Disney Olaf
I know. Mine pretty much looks like "Eating Disorder Olaf" in desperate need of a sandwich.
But getting these text messages made it all worth it.
And don't worry. I'm not opening a shop on Etsy any time soon. Or ever.
I think I'll stick to what I know. Reading books and drinking wine.
