A little seal friend for Grace

One of my students, Grace, asked me to make her a panda and a seal (this may or may not have happened last November...ahem). I am just now finishing up her seal, and I have to say, I think it has turned out adorable. When I first started working on it, I was afraid it would turn out looking like an earthworm.

As you can see, it totally doesn't, it has such cute little tail fins! It also helped a lot once I added the nose. It made him seem much cuter and friendlier (if he's a him...he might be a she...I guess that's up to Grace). 

But as you can see, our little seal friend is still blind. I created the eyes below based on the instructions of the designer of the pattern (Valentina Oglezneva, I purchased it here at Ravelry.com), but I really struggled with painting on the yarn. I don't know if I didn't have the right paint or the right paintbrush (the only one I could find was pretty wide, so I was trying to paint all this with the corner of the brush), and it also seemed like the yarn was really fuzzy and made it hard to paint the circles well. You can see the weird fuzzies I'm talking about, right? 

Plus, the eyes seemed REALLY big for our poor little seal's face. So I decided to show them to Grace before I finished sewing them on. She wants button  eyes instead, so back to Hobby Lobby I go! I will post an update when our little seal can see!