Those of you from the UK may remember an NHS campaign during the last flu outbreak:

This got me thinking, what if I could make a tissue holder / dispenser in the form of a germ? I  know it’s silly but this idea of brightly coloured “germs” dispensing the tissues that will be their demise still amuses me :o)

Germs have a “bad rap” for being nasty but they’re not all bad and some of them can be funny too – take this little guy…

I decided to use a resist method to create my germ and decorate it with shapes cut from prefelts in contrasting colours. I ended up making 2 resists, one oblong, that will be just large enough to take a packet of tissues and the second the same as the first but with semi-circles on the ends to give it more of bacillus (a type of bacteria) shape.

Green seemed like the obvious choice of colour, after all snot is green… Red or purple for the spots? I had some scraps of red prefelt after cutting lots of leaf shapes for a shawl I have been working on, so red it was.

The smaller resist has definitely worked best, the second resist is more suited to a glasses case, it is just too long for a packet of tissues.

I might try adding appendages to the next one… perhaps a curly flagellum? or some spikes or bumps over the surface?