Needles & Nilbogs

Ironically for a blog that’s on my college applications, writing college applications has mostly kept me from blogging lately. Totally coincidentally, I only have a couple of photos but they’re of something really cool!  For Halloween, I wanted to make something I could use for cosplay, and I chose the PreservationAux survey group from the Murderbot Diaries books.  The jacket is a gray long-sleeved tshirt that I cut open and sewed a zipper into, then embroidered, and the rest of the outfit is just stuff I had, except for the “feed interface” which I bought at the local ren faire.  Me in the costume Progress shots Gratuitous project and pumpkin picture. You can probably guess which pumpkin I did, and it’s not the dog.  Mirror selfie of the jacket right after I finished it. 

 If you see this on Thursday, it means scheduling posts works! (If you see this before Thursday it means I screwed up.) The reason I’m scheduling a post is because I’m gonna be completely offline Tuesday through Friday for senior retreat (both very excited and very worried, none of my friends are going on this one), and I don’t want to miss two weeks in a row.  I’ve been doing some embroidery lately, and I have lots of pictures! That’s what I’m going to show you today — all of these were done at school, usually on clothing I was wearing. I did these on the inside hems of my pants during a boring assembly Flowers from when I was bored at lunch  Emergency repair for my jeans when they developed a hole in the knees; it’s a woven patch, and I’m quite proud of it! (It’s fancy because, you guessed it, I was bored. I sense a theme here.) This is part of my Halloween/cosplay plan — it’s going to be the preservation logo that I put on the jacket I’m making! (It’s unfinished as of ...

 I’m thinking about halloween already. I know it’s kind of early, but I wanted to do something really detailed this year. I’m going to try to be one of the characters from a book series I like, the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. And given that weapons are a no for this, it has to be one of the humans, which means I need a feed interface.  Interfaces clip into the ear, and they can look like anything. I made one with pull tabs from soda cans and some thread, plus the clips off of a pair of clip-on dangly earrings. Yes, I should have been spinning. Yes, I promised myself I’d only spin this month. No, I haven’t been spinning.  On my right ear, showing where to put the clips (it’s not exact) and what the shape looks like Lying on my bedspread The process was pretty simple, although this is definitely a multi-craftual, complicated project. I’m not sure how well I can explain, but I’ll do my best.   To do something similar, you’ll need three of the pull tabs (the thing...

I’m calling today a wash in the writing department. Here’s the first batch of really badly edited halloween costume photos. I was Lady Blackbird from the game of the same name, and spent all weekend answering the inevitable “who are you?” questions with varying levels of specificness. Least specifically, the answer was “I’m a steampunk lady,” followed by “I’m a relatively obscure character from a fairly obscure role playing game”, followed by the most specific answer of “I’m Natasha Syranni, aka Lady Blackbird, from the game of the same name”.  I made the jacket — it’s red heart impeccable, in whatever the dark red is called, and made from my own pattern, with an edging in a gold acrylic yarn. All in double crochet, except for some shaping on the neck and the crab stitch edging. Worked with an H/8 hook.  The gloves were from a lovely pattern I found on ravelry, and are in two colors of Malabrigo Mora. I made the reticule to match, with just the simplest bag pattern I could com...