So! The cus­tom order I have been work­ing on ear­li­er this month has gone to its new home, so I can final­ly show you what they are! :D I’ll share some of our favourites here, but you can also see the full set on flickr.

Yes, it’s a full set of alpha­bet fridge mag­nets with cro­chet food items. Each mag­net stands 1 — 1.5 inch­es tall (the bunch o’grapes is the only one who is too tall for its kind, but the rest accept­ed him anyway). Mike came up with the catchy team name “alphafood” :D

Try­ing to fig­ure out how to incor­po­rate the let­ters took a bit of exper­i­ment­ing. At first I tried to cro­chet the let­ters, which looked alright…

But then when I got to “B” I had a hard time stop­ping it from mor­ph­ing into an “8”. So I tried cut­ting the let­ters out from felt. I did­n’t think it would work so well because none of my small scis­sors are super sharp, but between my one pair of large but sharp fab­ric scis­sors and my small dull scis­sors it actu­al­ly worked out real­ly well with all the let­ters. And then I just tacked them on with fab­ric glue and secured them with some stitches.

See? Much bet­ter :D

There’s some­thing about cut­ting let­ters out by hand that I find real­ly sooth­ing. I do that a lot with paper, and I’m hap­py to know that it works with felt too. Some of my favourites are the banana…

… and the strawberry.

The radish is Mike’s favourite.

And this is where the give peas a chance pat­tern comes from.

It was fun to come up with food items that are not too obscure and would trans­late well in cro­chet at the same time. While work­ing on them we had some friends over and they seemed real­ly excit­ed about guess­ing what some food items were. I did­n’t expect it could turn into such a fun guess­ing game…

Every­one took a while to fig­ure out this one.

V is for veg­etable soup!

One per­son got this one right away, I was pret­ty impressed!

U is for ugli fruit!

I thought peo­ple would have trou­ble with this one, but they guessed it right away.

Q is for que­sadil­la! (topped with a Q‑shaped dol­lop of sour cream! :D)

Anoth­er proud mem­ber of the Mex­i­can cui­sine that peo­ple took a while to guess. (It did­n’t help when I tried to give a hint by telling the rid­dle: “what do you call cheese that does­n’t belong to you?”)

N is for nacho! (a tri­an­gu­lar nacho chip, dipped in bits of sal­sa and nacho cheese! :D)

Besides Xigua, which is Chi­nese for water­mel­on, I could­n’t find a food that starts with the let­ter “X”, and water­mel­on has already signed up to rep­re­sent let­ter “W”. I found a forum where peo­ple were dis­cussing food items that start with spe­cif­ic let­ters for writ­ing a chil­dren’s alpha­bet book, and some­one sug­gest­ed the Her­shey’s Kiss for “X”. I thought it was a fine idea.

 

I hope the alphafoods will make it fun to learn the alpha­bets for the lit­tle boy who’s get­ting them! :D

Meet every­one on the alphafood team on Flickr! :D

Feel free to drop me a note through my Etsy shop or send me an email at genuinemudpie[at]gmail[dot]com if you want to chat about cus­tom orders!

Have a sweet week­end everyone!