What Makes a Monster a Monster?

The Monster Pouch Swap is now open for sign-ups on Craftster--yay!--but it closes on Saturday morning, so hurry if you plan to sign up.

While writing the information about the swap, and sewing the two pouches who will serve as our "spokes-monsters", I had to ask myself, what exactly is it that makes a monster a monster?  Here's the first one I made:

I made it using the pattern for the eyeglasses case I showed you last week.  Thinking back to the Hungry Monsters we made last August, I added lots of teeth.  The eyes needed to be monstrous, so I made them different sizes.  It still needed something, so taking my cue from Susan's rendition of my mystery critters, I added some scraggly hair, by sewing on some short scraps of embroidery thread (that really cleaned up some of the mess around my sewing chair!)

But I wasn't completely happy with the eyeglasses-case-monster, so I went back to the first monster I ever made:  good ol' Zipper Face (below)!  The zipper is the perfect monster mouth, especially when you use a constrasting color for the zipper and the inside of the mouth.  The eyes are especially good on this one too, because they are both very different, and one eye has an orange spot around it, sewn on with random zig-zag lines of stitching.

Using Zipper Face for my guide, I made this new monster pouch, below.  Yes, that's better! The two things that bothered me about the eyeglass-case-monster were the teeth (just a little bit of overkill there) and the matchy-ness of the fabrics I used.

So here are the ingredients for a pleasing monster pouch:
1.  A mouth with a zipper or teeth (just not too many teeth).
2.  Eyes that don't match, plus some added detail, like a spot around one eye, or layered buttons for one eye.
3.  Mismatched fabrics (but not so many different colors that it looks like a kindergarten exploded!)--strong colors seem to work well, and a print that could be monster skin is especially awesome (of course, fake fur is the ultimate monster fabric!)
4.  An extra detail or two, such as wonky hair, a tongue, or arms and legs will go a long way in making your monster pouch really unique and special.