The blog

I started this one on November 1st, as my first project whilst undertaking the challenge of crocheting every day in November for Bone Cancer Research Trust. In total I've managed to raise £463.13 (including Gift Aid and my employer's match funding) and did 45 hours across the 30 days (I slowed down at the end to not burn myself out) If people want to contribute, the donation page is here  - alternatively, people can just donate to the cause directly. Left: The doll, glowing in the dark. Right: The doll, in bright light Stats The doll is 12 inches tall and just over 9 inches in wing-span. The Wraith Blade is 9 inches long and about 2 inches wide. In total it took 39 hours across 19 days (so just over 2 hours a day), using 11 different yarns. Posability To ensure that the doll was posable, I used the wiring instructions detailed in Hoffman's "The Travellers" pattern. Well, roughly - she recommends a particular gauge of wire, but I just used what I had to hand. I don...

This one was particularly difficult: The Soul Reaver itself!   Probably the hardest part was constructing the skull, which had a fair few false starts. I found a pattern for a skull on club crochet  which was the basis for that, but I had to narrow the eyes, alter the nose, and narrow the teeth. It ended up looking more cute that intimidating, but that sort of fits in with the rest of the toys Pattern alterations The colours I chose were an off white for the bone, and black for the holes. Follow the skull pattern until Round 4 Rnd 4 sc 10, tr 3, sc 1, tr 3, sc 1 Rnd 5 sc 10, tr 1, split 2, tr2, split 2, tr 1 Rnd 6 sc 9, tr 1 blo, black sc2,  white tr1,sc1,tr1, black sc2, white tr1 Rnd 7 sc10, tr4, sc1, tr 4 Rnd 8 sc 1, inv dec1 x 3, sc9 Rnd 9 dec 3, sc1, dec 1, split -  sc4/ dec 3 The blade This also had a fair few false starts, but eventually I found a pattern for a zig zag or lightning bolt, which I followed. Annoyingly, I don't seem to have bookmarked the link. [...

After the Mario film came out I asked my son which character he would like a toy of, and he chose Bowser. This is pretty much the reason I started learning yarn craft in the first place, so I made him one. The pattern I followed was from this particular blog post from 2011 https://epic-yarns.com/2011/10/04/bowser/ I submitted a comment asking for some clarification, but didn't get a response. I think the blog is somewhat abandoned. However, you could consider this post as a supplement, as I have some suggestions on how to improve things. 1) First of all, the instructions for putting everything together are not the best. Even the follow up edit with photos doesn't make things much easier. As such, I will put some diagrams here (as they are clearer than photos) 2) The mouth is made of 10 pieces - 4 big balls, 1 small ball, 2 small tubes, and 3 big tubes. These all get stitched together using their tails. I'm not the best at stitching, and I would worry that things could come ...

For the past couple of years I've been dabbling about in Unity, but due to their recent PR disaster, I've shifted over into dabbling with Godot instead. The project I'm trying to create is a turn-based strategy game, which would include terrain. As such, units might be hidden behind terrain, so the user should be able to rotate the camera. To this end I've been following the Godot tutorials, creating a 3d plane, and putting a box in one corner so that I can see how the whole thing would rotate (if it were a plain plane, I wouldn't be able to tell it rotated). I didn't bother putting in a player character yet (as the concept is quite different to the example in the tutorial), but I did follow the steps  for implementing a camera. I wanted the camera to rotate by increments of 90 degrees (so there would effectively be 4 positions). Unfortunately, most of the maths in the documentation is about radians, which doesn't seem useful to me for this case, as it makes...

This is one I started working on pretty much immediately after finishing my previous doll - the namesake of the Legacy of Kain series: Kain (in his Elder Vampire form) It's been quite hard to work up the motivation for typing this up, in part because I sort of live-tooted it over on Mastodon Nevertheless it's been a bit of a long journey - we have a puppy who would probably try to eat whatever I make, so I was only working on it during my lunch breaks when I'm in the office (so at most a couple of hours each week) Through into that my getting an abscess on my back and getting it surgically removed, there's been a lot to get in the way (up-side though is that I now have a hole in my back that I could hang crochet hooks off of if I were a complete lunatic) This one used the same base as the others ( AmiguruME by Allison Hoffman ), but of course, with some adaptations. The flesh was done in a dark green (I could...

I've been keeping this one under my hat, a wee bit. It's fair to say that I'm a fan of James Stephanie Sterling's work - I remember when they started publishing videos on the Escapist, and at first they weren't for me, though eventually I went back and got hooked. Seeing their transformation, and hearing their explanation about it, has definitely helped me overcome a great degree of ignorance when it comes to LBGTQIA+ issues. Since they started wrestling not just in England, but local to me, I wanted to make a doll of them to give as a present, which I managed to at the debut of Avant Garde wrestling: On a separate note, it was my first live show - I may do a bit of a write up, though I'm not familiar enough with the art to go much further than "I enjoyed it!" The doll itself is, like the other dolls I've made and intend to make, based upon the patterns in  AmiguruME by Allison Hoffman . The main differences to m...