The Creature Feature: The Lost Socks division of Squishaus was born in the fall of 2011, after the company we had worked for for the previous eleven years folded. Our primary creator Nick had picked up a book on making sock monkeys a week earlier, as something to do with his now ample free time. In short order he had moved away from the traditional primates and was making strange and wonderful new creatures. We displayed them in the back of our VW Beetle, and they started to get a lot of attention from passersby. Magnus started giving them names and backstories, and in short order, it was clear we had a potential business on our hands.

Art You Can Touch: Nick already had a long history making plush before Lost Socks came to be. Educated in the Waldorf system for 12 years, he was immersed daily in the making of useable and wearable art, as well as the pleasure of all things soft and cute. A long admiration for the works of puppeteers Jim Henson and Brian Froud; as well as children's book illustrators Maurice Sendak and Tomi Ungerer, lent a heavy flavor to his work. In much the same way, we enjoy the marrying of cuteness with a sense of the macabre, or even grotesque- and these adorable little creatures today might be influenced by things as potent as horror shows, science fiction, heavy metal, and esoteric occult philosophies.

Not All Who Wander Are Lost: The question remains- why socks? Why stick with the ' sock monkey' as a basis for construction when we could clearly move on? If you think about it, socks have a very odd place in our hearts: On one hand, they're forgettable. They're something we step on. You can actually buy them in grocery stores, like something you would consume. And even at their most colorful and interesting, they're largely hidden from sight, glimpsed disappearing into shoes or up pants legs. But at the same time, every kid knows about the mythology of 'lost socks'. Where did my other sock go? The dryer ate it. The gnomes took it. It went to live with Jesus. Our drawers fill up with the mate-less, but still we hate to throw them out, and hold onto the idea that the other one will somehow turn up somehow if we just wait it out. Pretty obsessive for something we step on, isn't it?

In time our project lines grew to encompass Magnus' crochet work in our Hands of Man line, as well as Nick's feltworks in Half-Moon Mutiny, but the origin stories of these are a bit more prosaic. :)