Delayed Post: Goomba Amigurumi (Nerdigurumi)

My last delayed art post that I have pictures of currently.

A while ago I made a Goomba using the pattern on Nerdigurumi (also the banner at the bottom of my blog here).  It is FULL of catnip.  Stuffed.  I even bought a huge tub of the stuff to make sure I had enough to stuff the goomba with.

After getting some advice from MJ on how the felt and embroidery got destroyed by kitty attacks, I left them off completely and focused on making the toy as robust as possible.  I forget the colors I used, but all of the yarns were 100% cotton from brands on Nerdigurumi's higher rated yarn reviews.

Here are pictures I took of the goomba and of my cats (Sonic, the tabby, and Shadow, the black) enjoying their new toy for the first time~

Delayed Post: Shirts for Boyfriend!

This last summer and every summer for the past seven years or so, Kerry and I have visited each other.  This last summer in 2010 I got crafty and made him some shirts!  All shirts were given an inscription with fabric markers on the back-bottom-right of the shirt <3.

One I made as a Mario shirt.  Unfortunately in my first attempt I used up all the white matte paint stuff (that sticky kind of raised paint that the use on things like PE clothes or other school lettering), so I got to make a Dark Mario version.  I spread the paint as evenly and bestestly as I could.

Another I modeled after a black ink splat iron-on decal we found at the craft store:

We found a tiny but cute cat iron on patch that got a whole blue shirt all to itself!

Finally, I got some letters and an iron-on crab I thought was adorable.  In case you're not up on the World of Warcraft Blue Posters, Ghostcrawler was a very prominant Blizzard employee poster who fielded questions by the masses on the WoW forums.  Since making this shirt I think he quit or changed jobs (?) but I thought the shirt was an awesome idea anyway.

Delayed Post: Perler Bead Mic Kirby

Sometime late summer last year I wanted to try another larger sprite, something similar to the White Mage.  I went with one of my favorite sprites: rank three Mic Kirby.  I took some custom colors to his mohawk to make it look extra awesome.

He's currently mounted on cork (another experiment) at my cubicle.  Some people don't recognize him as Kirby at first, but I forgive them.  The bead-side faces out (the not-ironed-looking-side), and I cut off the clear bead border before mounting him.

Delayed Post: Gift for Aunt Denise

I had it in my head that I wanted to try Kanzashi (Japanese art of fabric-folding to make fabric origami hair ornaments) and made my aunt a pin using black and white fabrics she bought me long ago.

I also decided to spiffy up the presentation, namely hand-making a black and white themed card and (paper) origami box to hold the pin.  Here are the various parts and the final box package I gave her for her birthday last year in October.

Graduating Senior and Grad Student

Since my last post, I've been entrenched in my senior game design project, Pattern.  You can check it out here: http://people.ucsc.edu/~agrow/pattern/

I have applied to the UCSC grad program in CS and got accepted.  Hurray!  We just finished our coming-out party into the big boy games club at the "Inventing the Future of Games" event.  Here are just some links to the media coverage:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/34140/Future_Of_Games_Driving_Gameplay_Innovation_With_Technology_Research.php
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/34144/Future_of_Games_Generating_Natural_Language_For_Game_Dialogue.php
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/34142/Future_of_Games_Emily_Short_Talks_Building_Interesting_Gameplay_Around_Dialogue.php

I am busy working hard on my project, and will probably turn this section into a blog about it.  And I'm immediately jumping into the UCSC PhD program.  My art, she is withering.

Why Do I Always Drop the Ball on These Things?!

So, lots of updates since I last posted!

I never tried making a pattern before the heartless amigurumi, and I'm finding it a very challenging first step!  I am going through it now to make sure all I've done so far makes sense in terms of creating it.  Once I'm done, I'll post it!

I have sooo many projects I've been waiting to post on because I've been hung up on that pattern =X.  Expect project-dump when I finally sit down to post them all!

In other news, I have been wrapped up in a senior game design sequence at my school, a year-long project where you make a game with a team of 6-8 people.  I proposed an idea of a crochet simulator that will introduce the class to what it feels like to create and crochet (no one does...), and it got accepted!  A tool that I hope will come out of this project is the ability to create patterns in a kind of level editor and have the program print out the pattern for that design.  I'm so excited!

Crochet Amigurumi Heartless

Photo attack!

The idea was inspired by ~Phantasmfreud on Deviantart, and I had to try out my own, eyeballing the whole project based on that photo.  It was Nerdigurumi that gave me the confidence to try to make my own little dude in the first place.  The heart shown here was made using the pattern found here, but I also found good patterns from Owlishly and RoxyCraft.  I'm still not sure which one I like best, but making hearts is sure fun!

Also in Nerdigurumi fashion, I will try to find time to post a pattern in the next few days.  It'll be my first pattern, so I hope it won't be that confusing, but it's better than nothing, right?  ...Right?!