How To Make A Coconut Monkey

I just made a really cute coconut monkey! Here's how:

Supplies:

2 halves of a coconut shell
Hot glue gun
Hot glue sticks
Felt
A cord (A shoelace would work well)
A black thingamajigey (I don't know what it's called, so I'll post a picture of it)

Directions:

Make sure both halves of the coconut don't have any meat left in them. Punch out all 3 eyes of the coconut. Try to make one hole bigger than the other 2 for your monkey's mouth, like this:

Take the half of the shell that doesn't have eyes and drill a hole get your brother to drill a hole on the point in the middle of the shell.

Cut a strip of felt about 1-11/2 inches wide and 5-6 inches long. Take the half of your shell with eyes and glue half of the felt to the bottom inside the shell. Then line up the other side, make marks where the felt should go, and glue the other half of the felt to the inside bottom of the other shell. It should look like this:



You just made a hinge.

Now take your cord and double it over. Tie a knot on the double end, not the end with 2 points. Slide your black thingy (the picture's the next from the last) onto the doubles cord starting at the end with 2 points (remember, you tied a knot at the other end)and push it all the way down to the knot. Push both points of the cord through the hole in your monkey's rear end. It will look like this:



Now take the points of the cord, and glue them a little under and below each eye, like this:



The cord is the latch, the tail, and the handle. When you want to latch the monkey, squeeze the black thing and pull it up to the top of the cord, like this:



You can put stuff inside of your monkey and carry it around. Also, to make it look more like a monkey and not like a mouse, you can glue felt ears on the monkey, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Here's the finished product, minus the ears: