Introducing Nigel Grinchgibbons. I made this wonderful monkey for my husband when we were still dating. How much of a nerd am I?

He was crocheted in-the-round, just like amigurumi, using a pattern from one of my Grandmother's old Workbasket magazines. He was supposed to be done in normal sock monkey colors, but I did it in blue because it's Andrew's favorite color. I picked a monkey, because we use it as a pet name for each other. I can be such a sap sometimes.

We were living in San Francisco at the time. The best yarn store in the area was a huge warehouse-y place in Berkeley. I had to take a long ride on BART (the subway) and then walk for 3/4 a mile through a sketchy neighborhood to buy the wonderful terry yarn that I used to make Nigel. It is still the fanciest yarn I've ever used.

I didn't anticipate how incredibly creepy and demented a one-color sock monkey would look. The fact that his ears are a little low on his huge cranium and the addition of his iridescent black beady eyes only contribute to the over-all effect of weirdness.

When I handed Andrew the monkey I could see on his face a mixture of these feelings: (1) Alice made this for me, how sweet is that? (2) What the f*ck is this creepy thing (3) F*ck me! Is this supposed to be a monkey? (4) Kiss her on the forhead and say "thank you" as convincingly as possible. Soon after the forehead kiss, he actually *said* the other things and we had a big laugh as he named the evil genius Nigel Grinchgibbons.


Nigel Grinchgibbons' name is taken from this line in the movie Barton Fink, "Who cares about the fifth Earl of Bathsdrop and Lady Higgenbottom and... and... who killed Nigel Grinchgibbons?" In our couple-vernacular, we use Nigel Grinchgibbons to describe an insufferable ass and Lady Higgenbottom has morphed into Lord Hoggsbottom, which is used to describe other insufferable asses. I haven't made anything to graced with the name Lord Hoggsbottom --- yet.