Page 7 - Microsoft Word - Facilitators Guide Content & Cover

Did you know?

The sock monkey's most direct predecessors originated in the Victorian era, when the craze
for imitation stuffed animals swept from Europe into North America and met the burgeoning
Arts and Crafts Movement. Craft makers began sewing stuffed animals as toys to comfort
children, and, as tales of the Scramble for Africa increased the public's familiarity with
exotic species, monkey toys soon became a fixture of American nurseries. Tales like
Rudyard Kipling's the Jungle Book and Just So Stories inspired crafters to create toys that
depicted exotic animals, however these early stuffed monkeys were not necessarily made
from socks, and also lacked the characteristic red lips of the sock monkeys popular today.

John Nelson, a Swedish immigrant to the United States, patented the sock-knitting machine
in 1868, and began knitting socks on an automatic machine in Rockford, Illinois as early as
1870. On September 15, 1880, the Nelson Knitting Company formed, producing "Celebrated
Rockford Seamless Hosiery," and selling them under the name of the "Nelson Sock."

John Nelson's son Franklin created a machine that knitted a sock without seams in the heel.
The original machine required workers to sew every seam at the heel. The seamless sock
saved time and labor costs and it became so popular, companies began to imitate his idea.
These seamless work socks were so popular that the market was soon flooded with
imitators, and socks of this type were known under the generic term "Rockfords".

The iconic sock monkeys made from red-heeled socks, known today as the Rockford Red
Heel, emerged at the earliest in 1932, the year the Nelson Knitting Company added the
trademark red heel to its product. In 1932, advertising executive Howard Monk came up
with an idea to change the heel of the brown sock from white to red. The red heeled sock
was marketed as "de-tec-tip." Nelson Knitting added the red heel "De-Tec-Tip" to assure its
customers that they were buying "original Rockfords" as opposed to the generic
"Rockfords". This red heel gave the monkeys their distinctive mouth and during the Great
Depression, American crafters first made sock monkeys out of worn-out Rockford Red Heel
Socks.

In 1953, a woman named Helen Cooke received the patent for sock monkeys. She sued a
man named Stanley Levy because he sold sock monkeys, but they were not the same
design as hers. Levy contacted the Nelson Knitting Company hoping that they would declare
the patent invalid. The company knew that people had been making dolls for the last two
years, so they gathered up all the dolls that had been made the past two years so that they
could have evidence proving that Helen Cooke should not have the patent. One of the most
important pieces of evidence was a testimony and a doll made in February 1951 by a lady
named Grace Wingent. She was a resident of Rockford and she had made a doll for her
grandson. Helen Cooke settled the case against Stanley Levy when she was shown all the
evidence that had been collected against her. She decided to sell the patent to the Nelson
Knitting Company for $750. The company also paid other women for the rights to the doll
including a woman in Tennessee who was paid $1000. Rockford, Illinois became the "home
of the sock monkey."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sock_monkey

Materials:

1. One Pair of socks.
2. Stuffing - use Eco craft or polyester fiberfill (will need approx. 6-8 oz)

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