dragonknitter, you're probably right. However, I'd need to alter the pattern - leave an opening somewhere for stuffing (you stuff it before you do the last bit of I-cord for the "snout."

I also was thinking that stuffing before felting might compact the stuffing too much. I don't know.

***

I'm kind of beat this afternoon and am having a hard time getting motivated to work on the paper that I came in to work on. I "worked a funeral" this morning - one of the members of my church who had been fighting ovarian cancer for 5 years finally succumbed. (It's one of those, "It's sad...but at least she's not in pain any more" situations). I volunteered to help with the lunch. I was there from 9 until 1:30 setting up, serving, and cleaning up.

It seems kind of an old-fashioned thing to do..serving lunch to the family after a funeral. I was (by about 25 years) the youngest person there serving. I wonder if after the "old guard" goes, if the tradition will be lost, or if everyone will look at me and go, "YOU helped at some of those things...YOU know how it's done...YOU run it."

I don't know. I hate to see some of the old "community based" things go away, but it seems any more people are so busy with their children, or both members of a couple have to work, that it seems that few people of my generation have the time for that kind of thing. (And perhaps that's part of my periodic frustration with "It seems like I never get time to myself" - that I don't have kids and don't have a spouse so I tend to volunteer for things, and then I get asked to do more things than I really can take time to do.)

But I wonder...will there come a day when after the "old guard" is gone, I'm the only one left to do these kind of things? Will I overextend myself by still forcing myself to do it, or will I say, "Unless you help out, this tradition is going to die."

I don't know.