Finished Object Friday: Amigurumi Giraffes

My first crochet project for the year!! Last week I decided to make a present for my friend's daughters. I'd actually started to make something last year only to realise that it wasn't a very baby safe pattern due to the safety eyes. Ooops! I will have to keep that project for myself! I spent some time browsing the internets for a baby friendly amigurumi pattern and settled on these amigurumi giraffes by Irene Strange. 

If you find yourself in the same position as me and want to know what options you have for baby friendly amigurumi, Stacey from Fresh Stitches has written a post about it here. Crocheted, embroidered, felt or french knot eyes are all good options. I liked this pattern as the embroidered eyes are a main feature of the design.

The pattern is are called Dreamy Giraffes and I found it on the amigurumipatterns.net website. They are so adorable! I hope you can see that their sleepy eyes in the pictures... the boyfriend thought that I had forgotten to put eyes on them! 

The pattern was easy to make and very quick. A lot of giraffe patterns require that you crochet circles to sew on - which would take forever! The spots on these giraffes are sewn on, which is not only faster, but allows you to make irregular shaped spots like a real giraffe... not that looking like real giraffes is particularly important to me as I made these in very unnatural colours! 

They turned out a lot smaller than I was expecting so I wouldn't give them to a very young child. They seem alright for a 2-3 year old though.  

It's a really sweet pattern. I'll have to make one for myself at some point! 

I'm linking up with Tami's Amis for Finished Object Friday. Have at look at her blog for more finished projects :-) 

Nerdy Adventures: Catch Up

It's time for a Nerdy Adventures catch up! It's almost been two months since I last blogged here (I've been a bit better at keeping my Tumblr blog up-to-date, but not a lot). Now that the new year is upon us, I plan to be a lot more dedicated to my blog. So here's what's been happening over the last two months:

Crochet

In November the awesome Amigurumipatterns.net hosted a design competition. This site has a great collection of patterns from loads of designers and I love their Zoomigurumi pattern books. The theme of the competition was "animals at work" and I couldn't resist entering because animals wearing clothes are the cutest. I decided to adapt my mini pug pattern into a bigger version which I could "dress up". I made my pug into a detective (I'm not really sure why...I originally wanted to make a roller-derby octopus or a bureaucrat bunny).

He's supposed to be a modern private investigator rather than a Sherlock Holmes type, hence the police tape which reads "crime scene - do not cross". I called him Dresden after Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. I'm so happy with him. I'm still amazed that I manged to get him finished in time for the competition deadline as I spent most of my free time in November on Nanowrimo. 

December was all about crocheting penguins. Sadly I didn't take enough photos of my penguins as all but one of them were gifts. I had lots of other Christmas projects planned but they were all taken over by penguins! This is the first one I made.

The pattern is available for free from Pierrott Yarns. I liked this guy so much I made a load more. As usual with crochet gifts, I finished them last minute and didn't have a chance to take pictures of them in the light box.

I also made a larger penguin for a Christmas present using this pattern, which I adapted to have the same face as the smaller penguins. This guy turned out really well - it's a shame I don't have proper photos of him. He has adorable webbed feet which can't be seen in the one photo. Maybe I'll try this pattern again sometime.  

Excuse the plastic bag is the background... 

Gaming
I have so many games to play. So many. It's actually kind of crazy. The boyfriend gave me a PS3 for Christmas and I bought loads of PS3 exclusive games to play through. I've also got a few games for 3DS and PC to play as well. This post would end up being way too long if I talked about everything I'm playing at the moment, so I'll just focus on the two games that I actually managed to finish in December.

The first was The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds on 3DS. The game received really great reviews which I think are justified. The game is set in the same world as the Super Nintendo Zelda A Link to the Past, which I didn't know until I was playing it and started to feel like "hey, I've been here before." The game feels like it's a return to the "old school" Zelda games that I used to play on Gameboy compared to the previous titles on DS. I was expecting just another Zelda handheld game with and was pleasantly surprised. Link's new ability to turn himself into a painting seemed really silly when I first read about it, but it's actually a clever mechanic and introduced some interesting puzzles. The best part about the game however is it's emphasis on freedom. It sounds like a simple thing, but this is the first Zelda game that lets you attempt dungeons (other than the first one) in any order, and it really improves the experience. Instead of finding equipment in each dungeon that allows you to open the next area to explore, you are able to rent all the items in the game practically from the start. Several of my friends were playing the game at the same time and we all did things in a different order. I hope future games will continue with this. I definitely recommend playing this is you haven't already!

The second game I finished was the indie game Gone Home which I got in the Steam Sale - yay! I've wanted to play this for a while but the price tag of $20 was way too high for a game that is about two hours long. This is one of those games that some people like to argue isn't a game because all you really do is wander around a house and examine objects and listen to diary entries. Even if this isn't a game it's a worth while experience if you can buy it on sale. I don't want to talk about the story too much because it is a narrative based game and a lot of the fun of playing comes from unraveling it's mystery. Basically you take the role of Katie who returns home from an overseas holiday on a dark and stormy night to find that no one is home. The house is filled with objects that can be picked up and examined including books, letters and tissue boxes. The writing feels genuine and the voice acting is well done. Although it wasn't exactly what I was expecting in terms of the story, I'm glad that I finally played it.

Reading
I didn't read a lot during November and December for two reasons; firstly I was using up all my normal reading time making sure that I wrote 1667 words a day for Nanowrimo in order to reach the 50,000 word count and secondly because the book I was reading at the time was really long! It's happened to me a few times now where I've bought a book on Kindle only to realise how long it is when I've been reading for an hour and haven't even advanced the book by 1% (it must be noted that I do read pretty slowly :P). The book was The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. The book is essentially the life story of a famous/infamous hero. It starts with a framing narrative which sets up the legend surrounding the main character Kvothe, who has changed his name and is working as an innkeeper in an obscure village, and then then allows him to tell his story in first person. The book was a little slow to begin with, but from the moment Kvothe begins telling his story I was hooked. It's long and detailed and the story doesn't have a great deal of focus in terms of plot, but it's also engrossing and I found myself really invested in the story because I spent so much time with the character. It also has great world building and lovely writing which is at times poetic and moving. I will definitely be reading the next book in the series as the story is far from over when the first book ends.

Now I am pretty much up-to-date! As a final note I have to post my Nanowrimo winners badge because - I finished my 50,000 words. Woooooooo!! Now I just have to start writing it again...

   

Nerdy Adventures: 3 November 2013

First off, my adventures in Crochet this week...

I know it's late but,

Pretty much everything I have crocheted this week has been Halloween related. We had a Halloween raffle at work and I was asked to crochet something to make it Halloween themed. I made another tiny ghost using A Morning Cup of Jo's adorable pattern. I finished it in no time at all and thought that I should make something else as well. I decided on a pumpkin because it seemed like the easiest thing to make quickly. After a quick Google image search I found that there were loads of pumpkin designs out there. Lots of them appeared to be created by crocheting a ball and using a long tail of yarn pulled through the centre to create segments. The pumpkin turned out to be another really fast project. With the addition of a felt face, my pumpkin became a perfect Halloween ornament. I'm pretty impressed with it! The ghost and pumpkin in the picture aren't actually the ones I made for the raffle, I gave them away before I could take any pictures! To make up for it, I crocheted another pumpkin yesterday. This time I took LOTS of pictures.

Here is a quick tutorial on how to create the pumpkin shape.

The pattern is very customisable. You could use a crochet ball of any size or proportion. This one starts with six stitches, increases up to four stitches between every increase and has six rows of single crochet before decreasing back down to six stitches. The stalk is made by picking up a stitch in the centre between each segment. The stalk on my pumpkin has six stitches and is crocheted three rounds high.

I want to acknowledge that this design is heavily inspired by other pumpkins I found online. Even though I didn't specifically use these patterns the pumpkins from hip2thrift and Little Things Blogged where definitely inspiration - both are free patterns too if you'd like to make your own! Also these ones from Mohustore, which are so sweet and adorable, like all her designs!

***

My gaming adventures this week have been fairly scattered. I spent a lot of my week nights working on Halloween crochet and going out for dinner (which is actually rare for me on a week night, but this week I went twice!). Despite not having a huge amount of time for gaming I did start three new games. The first was Costume Quest. I had heard of this last year but I didn't have a chance to play it (probably because it was only on Xbox live and PC at the time). It was on sale on the app store for Halloween and I couldn't resist. The game is a cute little RPG about a brother and sister who go trick or treating and find that their night is ruined by monsters who are trying to steal all the candy. It sounds pretty childish, but it's cute and funny and the game's heroes turn into giant manifestations of their costumes when they go into turn based battles. I played the game for an hour or so on Halloween and it felt like exactly the right thing to do. At some point I'll find some time to finish it.

The next game I started playing is also by the developers behind Costume Quest - Double Fine Productions. It's called Middle Manager of Justice! and its available for free in the app store and on Android. This one is definitely worth checking out. It's hilarious (especially if you have worked in any kind of bureaucratic setting before) and is pretty good for a free to play game. The basic idea is to hire heroes, train them and send them off to battle bad guys, all the while making sure that your heroes stay motivated and the citizens under your protection are happy. I'll definitely be going back to this one when I have the time. One tip for new players: make sure you buy a rec room as soon as possible or you will have a lot of sad heroes on your hands!

Finally I have one more game to discuss; a point and click adventure called Lilly Looking Through. This one was on sale on Steam. I watched the trailer and was charmed by the beautiful animations and art style. The game has a demo, which I immediately downloaded. It's a standard point and click adventure about a small girl who is trying to rescue her friend; nothing new there. The puzzles are based around a mechanic of moving from past to present by putting on a pair of magic goggles. I don't feel like this mechanic is new either, but it is a nice touch in this game. The real strong point are the charming animations. Real care and attention has been put into all of Lilly's movements and gestures as she interacts with her environment. It's just gorgeous. I've only progressed through the first six puzzle scenes but I'm enjoying it so far though. I definitely want to see Lilly through to the end of her adventure.  

***

Despite all the gaming and crocheting I still found time for reading Dark Currents: Book One of the Agents of Hel series by Jacqueline Carey. I read this book for an online book club that I follow. I don't want to say the name of it because it's kind of rude and I worry that all the amigurumi on my blog would attract young readers and this is definitely an adults' book club. For age appropriate fans of fantasy romance books however, this book club is definitely worth your time!! It's hosted by Felicia Day (known for the Guild and her YouTube channel Geek and Sundry). The group has a panel discussion about a new book each month and posts it on YouTube. There are also forums on Good Reads to discuss the books.

Dark Currents is one of the better books that the club has read (in my opinion at least!). It's an urban fantasy murder mystery where the central character is a half-demon liaison to the Norse goddess Hel. The book strongly reminded me of the Sookie Stackhouse series, which I've read about six or seven of before I became bored with them. It's the same kind of idea; supernatural creatures coexisting with humans in a contemporary setting, multiple potential love interests... I prefer Jaqueline Carey's writing style however. I really enjoyed Dark Currents and will probably keep going with the series at some point.

That's it for this week. I'm not sure how full next week's post will be because Nanowrimo is in full swing! I've kept up with my word count so far, fingers crossed that I don't start slacking off!

Have a good week.
-Em.

Nerdy Adventures: 27 October 2013

Crochet...

It was a productive crochet week this week! I finished the tiny ghost pattern by A Morning Cup of Jo and made up my own pattern for a baby Squirtle. Here are a few pictures. I even made a Pokeball to brighten up the pictures.

Finished Object Friday: Tiny Crochet Ghost

I don't normally pay a lot of attention to Halloween; it's not really celebrated by anyone over the age of seven in Australia. For me it's an excuse to buy chocolate and lollies "just in case" someone in costume shows up... but more often than not I end up eating the whole lot myself and that is perfectly OK with me :-P This little ghost pattern from A Morning Cup of Jo is starting to change my mind about Halloween. I found the pattern yesterday and couldn't resist making it that evening. 

It's a great pattern; so cute and SO quick to make. I don't think I've ever finished a crochet project in one sitting before. It took me just over an hour from start to finish while watching TV. The best part of the design are the tiny arms which are created with a chain. That means the whole ghost is crocheted in one piece and there's no sewing required (aside from the mouth). It's also a great pattern for using up leftover white or cream yarn, which, for some reason, I seem to have a lot of! I will definitely be crocheting more tiny ghosts in the future. I'd like to make a garland of them in different sizes... maybe they could even have little hats!! Hmm.

The pattern suggests that you use pink fabric paint for the cheeks. I didn't have any so I used some felt instead. Luckily I had some ribbon lying around that I could use to turn the ghost into an ornament. (This might sound strange but a lot of the ribbon I collect comes from those weird little loops you get in dresses and shirts that are supposed to help your clothes stay on the hanger but end up annoying you by sticking out or making you itch. I've been cutting them out for years and one day decided I might as well keep them and put them to use... that's not that weird right?). 

I forgot to mention this is a free pattern. I recommend that you grab yourself a copy and whip up your own little ghost to decorate your house this Halloween!

Thanks for stopping by. If you'd like to see more finished objects, check out the blog Tami's Amis :-)

Crochet Monkey and Experimenting with a Light Box

I find that the hardest part of blogging is taking nice photos! I don't have a lot of opportunity for taking pictures in natural light and end up taking most of my photos inside, during the evening. This has led to a lot of yellow photos. I've been on a quest to create perfectly white backgrounds in pictures of my crochet projects for almost as long as I've been crocheting (about two years). Finally, I think I might have discovered the secret.

When I was complaining about the poor quality of my photos to a friend, she suggested that I make a light box. I had no idea what that was so I had to look it up. Luckily a light box is very simple to make at home. I found this tutorial online. I used a cardboard box, white bin liners and a large piece of white card to make my light box. It took less than an hour to make.

Unfortuntely a light box isn't all you need for taking pictures with a nice white background. Unless you are lucky enough to have the perfect conditions, the pictures will require editing in a photo editing program. I used a combination of picasa and gimp. Both are free programs that you can download. I used picasa for altering the lighting in the image and gimp for erasing any unwanted shadows around the edges. After uploading the pictures into this blog post I can see that I didn't put enough time into editing the photos... you can see where I've erased the darker blue colour from the background. Ugh, not very pretty. The photos below are a lot better.

Even though I clearly need to work on editing the images I'm really happy with how they came out. They are a big improvement on the pictures I have taken in the past! The white background really helps to show off my crocheted monkey. The pattern is from zooimgurumi which is a lovely collection of animal patterns. I had to buy the book after seeing the adorable monkey pattern on the front cover. He's just so cute! The pattern is well written and easy to follow. I decided to make my monkey green because I didn't have any brown yarn when I bought the pattern book and I had to make him straight away :-P I don't think it detracts from he's cuteness though!

Crochet Catbug from Bravest Warriors

Have you heard of the YouTube series Bravest Warriors? I discovered it a few months ago and was instantly hooked. The series was created by Pendleton Ward who also created Adventure Time and it has the same wacky humour as the earlier show. For me the best part of the show is Catbug, a hyper adorable ladybrid who's voiced by a six-year-old (or there abouts).

Here is a picture of Catbug from the show. He's the cutest!

As soon as I saw him I decided that I wanted to crochet my own Catbug. After Googling "crocheted catbug" I found that there were already a few examples out there and even a couple of patterns, but none of them were exactly what I wanted. So I made up my own crochet Catbug!

I'm Catbug!

I'm really happy with how he turned out! I tried to reproduce this picture:

In one of the episodes of Bravest Warriors Catbug brings freshly baked peanut butter squares from another dimension and wears these cute pink gloves to carry them. The gloves are removable. 

I used felt to make the ladybird spots on Catbug's back, only I think I went overboard and added too many spots! Next time I will crochet spots and sew them on to avoid the raised edges on the felt circles.

The most difficult part of the whole design was embroidering the face. I usually use safety eyes for my amigurumi, but I'm glad that I gave stitching a go for this project.

I'm going to attempt to recreate my Catbug pattern and share it on this blog because the world needs more Catbugs! Aww, Catbug always makes me smile :-)