Praise Him, Our Lord and Savior, Helix Fossil

As predicted, keeping up with a blog proved too difficult for me last year. So I'm going to try again! I have been crocheting a ton lately, with lots of commissions and while I have them tucked away in my handy dandy notebook, I really should try to get some of this down online.

Today was a sick day for me, and because I could do little else, I watched Twitch Plays Pokemon a fair amount. I love this experiment and the things that have come out of it so I wanted to make something my friends (who know far more about it than I) would appreciate. And clearly the Helix Fossil was my first choice.

While technically this is Omanyte (resurrected from the Helix Fossil) I couldn't resist.

Such a cute squishy god!

So I am fairly new to the world of making my own patterns, and completely new to the world of typing them into something other than my scribbles in a notebook. So let me know if you have any questions, and here you go!  

  

Hooks Used: 4 mm and 2.7 mm

Yarn: Red Heart Super Saver in Beige, tealish blue, white, black

Stitches: Magic ring (MR), single crochet (sc), increase (inc), decrease (dec)

Feel free to sell, give away, or hoard whatever you make from this pattern, just please don't claim the pattern as your own or copy it anywhere without directing back here. Pokemon is property of Nintendo. 

Shell with beige- with 4mm hook

1. 6 sc in MR

2. (inc) 6x (12)

3. (sc, inc) 6x (18)

4-?? 18 sc around until shell is around 14” or long enough to roll up. Very lightly stuffing as you go.

– (sc, sc, inc) 6x (24)

– (sc, sc, sc, inc) 6x (30)

F/O leaving a long tail for sewing. 

Begin to roll the shell up sewing it together every inch or two until it is a nice spiral. 

Body –  With blue- With 4 mm hook

1. 6 sc MR

2. inc 6x (12)

3. (sc, inc) 6x(18)

4. sc around (18)

5. sc around (18)

I found it easier to just sew the body into the opening of the shell at this point before continuing around. 

6. (sc, sc, inc) x6 (24)

7. dec x12 (12)     Stuff

8. dec x6 (6)

F/O sew opening closed

Legs (Make 9) with blue- With 2.7mm hook

1. MR 3

2. 3 sc

3. 3 sc

Cut and pull yarn through

Thread end back up through leg, keeping ends pointy-  tying two ends together then sewing onto the body from that side. 

Arms (Make 2) With blue- with 2.7 mm hook

1. MR 4

2. 4 sc

3. 4 sc

4. dec, 3 sc

F/o sew to sides of body

Eyes (Make 2) With white – 4 mm hook AND with black with 2.7mm hook

MR 5, sltch to join. Sew together, Sew onto body. 

Hooray!

2/30 Nyan Cat Bowtie and a Marriage Equality Bracelet

Well. The "In thirty days" plan has gone a bit by the wayside due to an unexpected illness that left me too sick, and too zonked on meds to make anything for a good while. But I'm starting to get better and starting to make things again.

So today I made two things- the first being something that I did find on Pinterest. This adorable nyan cat bowtie from NyanPon!

Eee! Cute! 

I had just picked up my room and put all my yarn in my organized little baskets, just to rip a bunch of them out again. D:

These will get put away in another two weeks.

This was a quick little project with no real problems or complexity, it is simple colored rows with a pink and tan band around it. But it is just too cute. I will wear this next time we decide to go out and be fancy.

My model Mr Stitch says "Bowties are cool"

Last night I also was sitting around and listening to the Supreme Court hearings for marriage equality, while reading the ever more annoying and bitter Facebook arguments and decided that I needed to do something more relaxing so I went to make an equal sign bracelet. This campaign has been represented by a pink equal sign over a red background from the Human Rights Campaign.

So here you go, this was my first experience with crocheting while changing colors without stopping and restarting. I lost the tutorial that I looked at a while ago so I forgot some critical steps- like this works better in the round. But I learned my lesson about that, and will still proudly wear my bracelet as a reminder that we are all equal and all deserve equal rights.

And there we go. That is my mini soap box for the day.

Yuuup. Two mini projects to try to get me back into crafting after being sick. And maybe now I can get back into the swing of getting my life together and work on some stuff, perhaps even the commissions that I have waiting. 

1/30- Song Lyric Art

Okay, so the name of it isn't that great. But this kept popping up all over, and I had to give it a shot. The original was made by Elsie over at A Beautiful Mess. It was made with a song lyric over a paint by number. 

It seemed pretty cute so I thought I'd try it out. I'm not a fan of paint by numbers. But I do have  around 150  movie cards that I got when Blockbuster went out of business. I sorted them into ones that had some cool colors to show through the white and decided on Across The Universe. Picked out a lyric, and ran into my first problem: Not enough letters. My particular quote had 14 Es in it and there was no way I would be able to use the same kind of font throughout. Craft room to the rescue though, and we scrounged up enough letters to make it work.

I thought it looked pretty cool like this

Step 1: Spray paint a clear coat over whatever you are putting the stickers on, this keeps it from tearing when you remove the stickers

Step 2: Spell out your quote with stickers (I used a long quote so more showed through because of the small stickers)

Step 3: Spray paint the whole thing with white. Let dry. (I ended up with two coats just to make sure nothing showed through. I missed a bit at the bottom though)

Step 4: Remove the stickers. Tweezers worked well for this. 

Done!

I think mine turned out a little Dr Seuss-esque with the different fonts and the fact that the letters aren't straight. But I think it worked out well enough.

All in all I thought this was a fun, quick, and easy project I'll probably be making more, perhaps in different colors to hang around my apartment to give it a little bit of life. 

30 Pinterest Projects in 30 Days

When I first saw Pinterest I was less than impressed. It is just a never ending page of random junk. Then I signed up. And I got horribly addicted- especially to the DIY and Crafts page. My mum said it best when she claimed that we are in the minority of Pinteresters that actually attempt the projects that we pin, and it's true, I have done many of the things that I have pinned. And now I want to try to do 30 of them in 30 days. And maybe that will motivate me to actually update this blog. >_> I am not going to lie to you- I might end up posting stuff that I pinned and worked on earlier, but still. 30 projects is pretty respectable. 

Let's go! 

Shroom Blanket

On a whim one day about a year and a half ago I decided "I want to crochet." I don't even think I knew what crocheting was, but I knew I wanted to do it. And so I did. I went out, bought the cheapest pack of hooks I could find and three skeins of yarn. I got home and asked myself, "now what?" I looked up the basics of crocheting and made myself two hideous headbands. Having that down and feeling pretty good about myself I decided that I needed to go for something bigger. And what is better for a first crocheting project than a full size blanket? (I am pretty brilliant, if you hadn't noticed.)

So I ponder on what it is that I really love and would want to spend many hours on. It immediately comes to me. I love geeky things. I love old school Mario. (This was also during a period of my life where I played much Super Mario Bros Wii with my roommate.) I will make a Mario related blanket. And as an added bonus- 8 bit characters are supposed to be blocky, so I can make it out of granny squares and sew them all together! It will be a piece of cake! 

What came next was hours of crocheting and sewing over the next six months (I had some problems with my attention span at the time.) I went back and forth on what I wanted to do, how big I wanted the blanket to be, and how true to the original game it should be. What I decided on about halfway through was that I wanted to make four mushrooms: 1-up, super, mega, and mini. 

And so, six months, 600 squares, and 120 hours later... I finished! I decided on more compressed mushrooms because I didn't want the blanket to be 12x12. I think they're kinda cute though.

Pretty happy with the final product, especially for my first attempt at anything crochet. :D

Obligatory Introduction Post

Hi! I'm Laura. I make things.

I really didn't need to do an introduction post, did I? God, I hate blogging. I must get better at it. I'll try again.

Hello. You have found your way to my blog. It will be about the things that I make. This usually means the things that I crochet, but occasionally I cook things. Basically what I wanted to do was have a place where people could go look at my stuff, and if they were interested in buying any of it or commissioning anything they could get in contact with me.

Really I just want to be vain and all like 'OHHHHHH LOOK AT THE PRETTY THING I SPENT A MILLION HOURS ON.'

So here we go.