Can the Amish Even Be Super Spies?

Yesterday morning, I snuggled on the couch with the little ones to watch a movie before breakfast. There was about 10" of new snow outside; it was still more dark than light; and the children, up at 6:30, were still in the mood to cuddle. After watching Ratatouille, Son and I decided to make omelets. As we sat and ate and talked about the movie, I said to him, "You know, you could be a chef if you wanted to, when you grow up."

He made that noise I hate -- a cross between a moan, a grunt, and a squawk of petulance -- and stomped his foot.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"I wanted to be a Super Spy," he said, with only a slight hint of whine in his voice. And not even a twinge of sarcasm.

I knew better than to laugh at this latest aspiration. "It's true," I replied. "Super Spies are much cooler than chefs. You could certainly be a Super Spy if you wanted to be. I just didn't know that's what you wanted."

He nodded, chewing thoughtfully on a giant bite of cheese omelet. "Teddy wants to be a Super Spy too," he announced around the last bits of egg in his mouth. "And he needs a Super Spy Outfit."

"Of course he does," I said promptly, completely relieved that it was not Son who suddenly needed a new suit of what were sure to be very specific clothes.

"He needs a jacket. And a hat. And glasses, of course," he added.

So after the kitchen was clean, we got out the heavy wool felt, needle, thread, and scissors, and set to work to make Teddy a new outfit. The Sheriff's vest we'd made Teddy months before helped convince Son that he could sew as well as I could, so of course, Son had to do the shoulder seams and side seams himself. Unequipped with the patience to let him try to set the sleeves, I managed to convince him that sewing on curves was too tricky, so he let me do that part of the spy jacket.

We had a few mishaps trying to sew on the buttons, but when the jacket was finished it looked...


"hmmmm..." Son said a little doubtfully. "He kind of looks like he's about to get married."

"Don't worry," I said, silently trying to quash mental images of Paddington Bear in his raincoat. "He will look very Super Spy-ish as soon as he gets his hat."

Next up, however, was the glasses, which we fastened out of pipe cleaners. (In case you have to do this yourself: real pipe cleaners, instead of those fuzzy felt crafting wire ones, are excellent for a purpose like this, since the real ones have tiny little wires sticking out of them over their entire length, which are excellent for gripping Teddy fur thereby keeping glasses on Teddy heads.)

Son was immediately enamored and promptly colored them red with a permanent marker.


I discreetly swallowed the Clark Kent references that bubbled up. Also, I secretly congratulated myself that Son doesn't know who the Blues Brothers are.

We moved on to the hat. This was a challenge. I've never made a hat this small before. And wool felt of a weight suitable for a coat, while perfect hat fabric, is not particularly easy to work with on a tiny scale because it is so stiff. I puzzled a little over the pattern, and then showed this picture to Son, hoping it might be acceptable. It would be easy to make in the right shape and size.

He took one look at it and rolled his eyes in practice for his you-just-don't-get-me-mom teenaged years. "That's a Detective hat, not a Super Spy hat," he said, with thinly disguised contempt for the offending article.

Don't ask me how he knows these things.

So, of course, I did what any desperate mother does who is tasked with making a porkpie hat, circumference 9", for an orsine Super Spy: I Tweeted for help.

@JPippert came to my rescue immediately, suggesting doll-making sites might have something useful. (Silly me, I'd been googling for directions for hats for teddy bears. Srsly. Sometimes the life of the mother of a Super Spy can become a little too focused.) She sent me to a great site selling doll-sized hat shapers, and then what I really wanted was a beautiful hat form so I could make Teddy a proper fedora. Who knew one could buy real hat forms that would produce 7" circumference hats?!?

In case you were not a theater costume-shop geek in college: to make real hats, you stretch and shape the damp base fabric -- either buckram or heavy wool felt -- over a solid form that is the hat size and shape you need. Once the fabric dries, you remove it from the form, and it retains its shape, and then you cover/decorate/trim as desired.

Thankfully, Son has not yet misspent his college years in a theater costume shop, so he didn't know what he was looking at when he saw the fedora form. I was grateful, since making a fedora without a hat form is basically the equivalent of trying to start a garden without seeds. I showed him this lovely porkpie, which he admired. And seeing the picture in 3-D made it clear to me how to make the thing. (In case your own Ted needs a hat, I did find some reasonably good basic hat-making directions.)

Many very tiny stitches later, the hat was done. And Teddy looked wonderfully, fantastically, supremely...

Amish. There was no getting around it.

Once I finished choking down my laughter, I went and presented Ted to Son. His eyes lit up -- no doubt because we do not live in Pennsylvania, and he has never met anyone Amish. "He needs a Super Spy name," Son said. "How about Mooker?"

"Mooker is good," I said. "It sounds very Spy-ish."

"No, no! I know!" he exclaimed, on the way up the stairs to bed. "How about Fritzi? Fritz?"

"Fritz is a perfect name for a Teddy!" I agreed. Really, it seems to suit this particular Ted extremely well.

"Fritz Mooker!" he cried. "That's his Super Spy name." He dashed out of the bathroom from brushing his teeth. "Wait," he stopped on the landing, looking up at me. "What is it again?"

"Fritz," I said.

"Oh yeah....Daddy, look! His Super Spy name is Fritz Mooker! Isn't it great?!"

I have to admit, Fritz Mooker is a pretty great spy name. And as long as Ted...er, Fritz, is skulking around under lampposts with his Super Spy case (yes, now I have to make him a satchel for all his spy gear), I'm pretty sure everyone will know just what he is.

Then again, Fritz Mooker does also sound oddly like it could be the name of that nice young Amish lad who accompanies his mother at the pie-selling table on Farmer's Market Thursdays.

Perhaps that's Teddy's cover? He's Fritz Mooker: Amish farm-teddy by day, Super Spy when duty calls.