Sunday, September 25, 2011

Completed: Toothless!

So I finally took the time to sit down and spend some time away from my computer screen to craft.  My very first project was to make a stuffed Toothless from the movie How to Train Your Dragon.  Well, that was before I had my sewing machine, so I was piecing it all together by hand.

Well, needless to say that was long and slow and painstaking and I never actually managed to finish the poor guy.  I finally dug out all of his pieces and finished the last bit of sewing, stuffed him, and here he is!  My very first stuffed animal... about six months later :p.





Isn't he cute?  He's made of black velveteen cut from a skirt I never wore.  The wings and fins are all hand stitched for the veining (ugh!  Never doing THAT again!) and there are pipe cleaners in the edges of the wings.

I did learn a lot working on this guy.  The wings aren't really fully posable, and one of his legs likes to lay at a funny angle, but hey!  I've got a Toothless!  I'm just happy the poor guy is finally done and stuffed and not a pile of fabric pieces in my drawer.

Oh, and I used this tutorial.  Katy-A deserves the credit for making the pattern!

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Found: Super awesome and geeky crafts

So while browsing the internet I've been finding a wealth of amazingly cool, nerdy, and creative crafts.  I already made myself a Kirby plush (more coming later) but some of these are just amazing.


Particle Zoo is an effort by CERN and the folks working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to bring the world of particle physics into the realm of "cool", or at least populate professors' desks with awesome little plushies.  They have made versions of all the subatomic particles, which you can buy individually or in lots such as the "everyday matter" box, or "universe in a box" (includes everything but antiparticles).  They are even stuffed with different materials in accordance with their real weights!

My favorite of the Particle Zoo has to be the special particles.  I just about died seeing the flavor mixed neutrinos and the decaying quarks!  Well, I DID work with particle physicists, and do an entire project on the stuff.

It's a DNA scarf!  The free pattern can be found here, and it makes me really bummed I don't know how to knit!

Custom cat doll from Luna.
There's this lady in the Netherlands that makes custom dolls that look like your cat.  I love the ones of the long-haired kitties especially.  Some of them are so detailed!  Why is it so hard to find nice orange fur so I can make a version for myself of Munch?

This one isn't for me personally, but it seems pretty cool!  DNA 11 has you send in a cheek swab and they make wall art out of it!

I hope someone enjoyed this explosion of crazy crafts.  I am very serious about the Particle Zoo set though.  Every budding physicist needs one!