My two projects

These are the two projects I made in their entirety (as in: started AND finished) during spring break. Both were crocheted. The second one, in particular: it was a LOT of crocheting.

The first project is April, but she prefers to be known as Cupcake (a nickname she gave herself):



Cupcake is a little monster. Or maybe a fairy. Or maybe a half-breed fairy-monster: she has horns but not wings, but she has magic like fairy magic, and she definitely is not scary, and she likes people and wants them to be happy. (Her nickname comes from the fact that the Big Twist yarn I used for her is in the colorway called "Cupcake Sprinkle").

She's made off the Bella design in Kerry Lord's "Edward's Imaginarium" book. Except I used acrylic yarns (her horns are Vanna's Sparkle in the white-and-silver-sparkle colorway, yarn used double because it's a sportweight and her body is a worsted weight).

Her eyes are sparkly blue lock-washer eyes, instead of the more-enigmated embroidered eyes featured in the book. I considered giving her a mouth - either just a smile of embroidery floss (a little too human) or jagged felt teeth (but she didn't want to be "pure monster" so I left the teeth off and just left the enigmatic expression generated by "just eyes".

She's also apparently a Sailor Moon fan, because she has her hair tied up in an approximation of the "meatball" ('odango') hairstyle Sailor Moon wears. (I could probably do that with my own hair - it's long and PROBABLY still thick enough*, but I suspect I'm also a bit superannuated for that hairstyle to really look right)

(*one of the unfortunate gifts of menopause is that my hair seems to be thinning a bit, and is more brittle. DO NOT WANT. I have taken to regularly using keratin conditioners in the possibly-vain hope of making my hair more resilient. Yes, I take a B vitamin, and yes, I think I am getting enough protein in my diet)

The second creature made is a more-recognizable-as-real creature: made off the Irene Strange "Ollie the Sloth" pattern that Purlewe bought me for my birthday:



I used Vanna's Choice for the main body and Red Heart Soft for the other bits. (He has a stripe on his belly because even though I bought more than the pattern called for in the main color, I still ran a little short - I think because the pattern was written for dk and Vanna's Choice is a worsted. But it still looks OK to me).

I named him Taffy because I couldn't think of a name I liked better, and I finished him one evening when the re-run of Bob's Burgers was the "Belchies" episode (one of my favorites: it's the homage to "The Goonies," which is a movie I have happy memories of, and also enjoy rewatching. The plot in "The Belchies" involves the kids going to an abandoned and soon-to-be-torn-down taffy factory because there's a legend of a treasure and....well, there's also a giant chunk of taffy shaped like a person that Louise winds up "befriending" and naming Taffy after she winds up trapped in the factory...)

He's BIG. I did manage to  cram him in my carry on to come home but just barely. Basically he is crocheted as a big circle, and then at the end of that you do some stuff to bring the edges of the circle together, and make an opening for the face, and you make the arms and legs, and then the opening where the belly goes...

His eyes are small buttons; I was going to buy lock-washer eyes for him but Michael's didn't have any, and I forgot to bring any the right size of my plain black ones. The buttons work, though.

Here are Taffy and Cupcake together. (Heh. I never realized until now I named them both after sweet treats, but Cupcake's REAL name IS April....)




Another thought on Bob's Burgers: I think maybe one of the reasons I love the show is that a lot of the episodes - especially some of the early-season episodes, and one of the ones I really love - pay homage to movies that were big when I was a kid or teen (I am guessing that a lot of the writers of the show - like some of the MLP:FiM writers - are probably Gen Xers. We may get skunked in a lot of other areas of life - I doubt we will ever have a Gen X president and just go straight from Boomers to Millennials - but at least we have some good cartoon scriptwriters). There's "The Belchies" (which even has Cyndi Lauper coming back and doing a re-working of "Goonies R Good Enough" as the closing song, and MAD respect to her for that; I think I love Cyndi Lauper even more now, and respect her more as a musician than I did as a teen). And there's "OT, the Outside Toilet" which is a send-up of "ET," and the Stand by Gene episode (another favorite) where the kids take a cross-country trek, not to see a dead body, but to see a two-butted goat. And the one where they had Saturday Detention that Mr. Frond turned into some weird "Project Runway" thing - of course, drawing on "The Breakfast Club"....

(For whatever it's worth, "Time after Time" is my favorite Lauper song)