Give Us Today Our Daily Bread. And Butter. And Owl.

What is it with this apparent zeal for handcrafted representations of foodstuffs? What am I missing here? Has Martha Stewart, say, had a damascene conversion and designed some crazy new diet which demands that instead of baking and eating that delicious tray of cup cakes you now instead knit it?

There are bountiful examples so I shall limit myself today to that most humble but comforting of comestibles, cooked bread.

Here's a genial and sexy looking slice of toast, made, it would seem, out of leopard skin. In a lacy tutu, if you please:


The caption excitedly asks us "Don't you just love toast???"

Why, yes. Yes, I do. That's why I eat the freaking stuff rather than wasting hours of time, yards of felt and vats of glue making an anthropomorphic wholemeal doppelgänger.

Toast with a face is a recurring theme. Say hello to the woefully unimaginatively named 'Mister Toast':


He looks a bit glum; but an understandable lack of enthusiasm for the project prevents some people sewing on any sort of visage at all, making it all the more pointless:


How about a delicious pat of butter to spread on that lovely, er, grey bread?


Again with the face. And I think it's wearing blusher. (Blusher for butter = blutter. Perhaps).

Here's some handiwork that was called an 'owl'. Right. I'm guessing that it was another felted slice of toast that went wrong, with some big old owly eyes and beak hurriedly stuck on:


Even so, it still looks more akin to burnt bread than to anything strigiforme.

Unless ... unless all the rest are a succession of owl crafts that went so badly awry they had to be called toast. Either way, I'm not buying it. In more ways than one.

G. Henry