It began with the Fiberfill – an enormous sack of polyester stuffing a dream. Mr Tabubil, I was determined, was getting one serious Christmas present -the most giant Christmas Squid ever seen in Santiago.
Ever since way back in 2013, when I saw a post on Cation Designs about Squidney, then had a medium size cardiac arrest in front of the computer and yelled at Mr Tabubil to come and see it – Mr Tabubil had yearned for a giant Cephalopod of his very own. *
*He really had, honestly.
It took a few years, but with a little patterning help from the internet and a special trip into Barrio Independencia, Santiago’s fabric district, for a lot of cephalopod stuffing, I made his deepest darkest polar-fleece dreams come true.
I wanted to make him something so big it could double as a sofa, but when you are making a large project, it is important to be practical. I had originally planned for at a squid at least twelve feet in length, but we were living in a downtown city apartment, and I had to be hard-nosed and realistic. I decided I’d settle for eight feet, tentacle to tip.
The pattern had been easy. The polar-fleece was easy too – an upholstery store up the street had quite the color selection. Stuffing though – stuffing was harder. The truth is that most of the fiberfill stuffing available in Chile is not very nice. It balls and it lumps, and when I made a stuffy for a new baby, I had to bring North American fiberfill down to Chile in my suitcase or the stuffy was as lumpy as a twenty-year old favorite pillow. It had been awkward enough bringing down enough stuffing for small stuffies for small babies – flying in enough fiberfill for an eight foot Christmas squid didn’t bear thinking about.
I went on the google again, and made some calls, and my mother in law, who was visiting us for Christmas, came with me into Barrio Independencia to visit a shop that specialized in commercial-grade furniture stuffing.
The shop was a surprise. We parked the car right front of the address, and still walked back and forth past the place once or twice before we spotted it. It was no wider than the pair of old wooden doors in front. Behind the doors it was only the depth of a packing container in back, and it was filled top to bottom and front to back with blocks of foam of every possible sort, and mountains of stuffing in every color and density imaginable. Sofa-size blocks hung from the ceiling, plastic sacks sprouted from the walls, hanging on hooks like heavy fiberfill storm-clouds and the air was thick with drifting polyester fluff.
From the front door, we yelled hello. From somewhere inside, someone shouted back. Foam stirred, and we saw a woman making her way towards us, twisting her way between the stacks and the sacks. There was no room for us inside with her, so she listened to what we wanted from where we stood outside on the pavement. Unknotting the mouth of one of the great sacks, she pulled a machete out of her belt and began slicing slabs of stuffing from the mountain of fiberfill inside it, and then, with a strength and a swiftness that caught us by surprise, she slid our slabs into another sack and knotted it tight.
We brought the stuffing home, and, well….where do you hide a sack of stuffing that big in an apartment?
My in-laws were visiting us for Christmas. I had a work room, but it was doubling as the guest room. My sewing machine had already been moved out to the dining table and in the sewing room itself, a double bed and a stack of suitcases filled every available inch. Picture then – a bed, with a giant sack of stuffing on top of it and pillows and cushions mounded up around the sack, a quilt thrown over everything and my mother and father in law, draped artistically over all of it, reading books and trying to look natural –
What I’m saying is – they really love their son.
(And we kept the lights dim when Mr Tabubil was about.)
I sewed the squid body at a friends house. There wasn’t room at mine. And then I stuffed it. The two long tentacles alone took an hour to stuff -each. , pinch by tiny pinch of stuffing, one after another. And bit by bit, the artistic mountain that was the guest bed diminished (the giant Christmas squid fit under the bed, for which my in-laws were grateful) – and we could start turning the lights up again.
Two days before Christmas, my mother in law dragooned Mr Tabubil into a pre-Christmas cooking spree while I locked myself in the guest room in 36 degree Celsius heat sewing eyes onto the thing, and let me tell you, until you’ve been locked in a small, 36 degree Celsius guest room with eight feet of polar-fleece squid, and a leftover mountain of fiberfill stuffing and ALL the drifting polyester fluff, you haven’t really experienced the magic of sewing for Christmas.
Mr Tabubil said, later, that he never for one moment guessed that anything was going on. Either that man is the most sincere and charitable liar in the history of wide-eyed whoppers, or he is one seriously unobservant spouse.
And then it was Christmas morning. The giant squid was presented. The giant squid was unwrapped. Mr Tabubil was shocked, stunned, amazed and… truthfully, a little appalled.**
Eventually the two of them became reconciled. And my in-laws had their bedroom back. Mr Tabubil named him Archibald – Archibald the Giant Christmas Squid.
**Mr Tabubil: “I can I believe that when you showed me a picture of a giant squid on the internet, I said I wanted one. And I probably meant it – for about 5 minutes! And then I forgot. I moved on. I certainly never imagined one would actually show up and take over our living room! What are we supposed to DO with this thing?!”
