#We'll see. Gotta figure out what I want to do for the layout since I have to start over from scratch ;;;; ;;;;

[hyaciiintho]

🌸｡*ﾟ+. Sorry to anyone waiting on an ooc reply from me through DMs. I'll try to get back on track soonish, but it might be after these next two weeks that I do. Gonna be visiting family and friend on the east coast, so I'll be occupied. Bringing my laptop with me, in case of anything, but it's not a guarantee I'll get much done while over there.

Regardless, I appreciate everyone who sent stuff in ♡ I might be doubling down on memes for these next work nights so I can get my queue stuffed enough for my absence.

I hope everyone has a lovely day/night ♡

[justhereforeskel]

Christmas Dino V1

Part 1

I'm still chugging along so it's time for updates!

Day 2

Found some old newsprint sheets in the craft room. Laid them out in a 2 x 4 foot group for some pattern layouts. The spine and tail weren't going to fit on anything smaller.

Figure 1 - the GIANT table I could have used on day 1 but didn't and now my spine STILL hates me

I then popped a line in to make to 2 x 2 sheets to see if I could get away with smaller boards for the rest of the pattern. The smaller the board is the less wrestling I have to do with the laser engraver.

Success! With a little left over to spare if I need counter weights or anything. I honestly do not know if this thing will be balance properly and I'm not gonna do the maths to find out (or simulate it in a CAD program like I've seen some others do) TRIAL AND ERROR BABY!

One trip to Home Depot later and I've secured my wood! heh

Also some gloves for preventative maintenance on my hands because we all know splinters are a thing and I cannot be trusted not to hurt myself. Next step is remembering to actually use the gloves tho. We'll see how that goes...

Anyway, off to do some fiddling with how Tyreal is gonna fit on this whole thing.

I had to decapitate my poor cardboard boi at this point, because there was just no way I was gonna try to do this with an entire limp skeleton attached.

Okay so I've got one dino skull and one Tyreal. Hmmmm...

So my first thought was just, make it super duper easy. I'll cut a notch in the middle piece and Tyreal can sort of ride it like a horse (with maybe a saddle down the road). Like this:

Okay, not bad.

BUT

sigh He's got the whole tabard of righteousness and it's made of rubber so it's not super flexible. And while it will sort of smush out of the way, it's gonna end up stuck like that and that'll just annoy me to no end.

I could get really fancy and like...cut a slit for the front and back of his tabard but that just feels waaaaaay too fiddly and prone to fucking up.

Thinking.....thinking....

What if...okay so Tyreal has a battery box to make the lights light and I'll need to make some sort of holder for it.

I did kind of want him standing too, you get more visual out of it. So what if I went, like, chariot style? I can get fancy with the sides, and create a double layer base to tuck the battery box in.

Some swearing, a few close encounters with cardboard cuts and volia! (ish)

Okay the basic idea is there but I measured nothing and it shows.

Alright, the concept works let's just try with a little more...effort.

And....

Actual volia!

The battery box fits lovely, the sides aren't too out of proportion and he's still nicely visible! Hurrah!

Tyreal also has the balance of a drunken college kid, so I've traced his feet and I'm going to try to engrave little recessed holes for them in attempt to make him a wee bit more stable.

Additional thoughts that came to me while crafting this:

I can get fancy with cut outs on the chariot sides if I want, which could be fun

Since I want the battery box to be hidden but easily accessible, I'm thinking some kind of leather wrap or tassels around the base of the chariot to obscure it but not make it a pain to get at

Since this is a chariot, he's gonna need some reins. For this year I'll probably do some sort of ribbon dealy BUT this means it's not unreasonable to make a full leather bridle for him next year. And give him a little metal nameplate across the nose band. yes yes yes

This whole contraption might just unbalance the whole t-rex but we'll deal with that later. Maybe. Shush. Bolting him to the table will totally be a reasonable solution.

Okay, that feels productive enough for the day! Now I've really gotta knuckle down and get the original pattern and the new pieces all created in Lightburn....weeeeeeeee -.-

ONWARD!

[moongothic]

A relatively quick and quite experimental crochet project to kiiinda start the year off; a crochet bag from scrap yarns! (And other scrap materials now that I think about it)

So I had some yarn left over from my blanket of darkness (I can't believe the rounds that post is making, what on earth), one untouched ball of black yarn and then three balls of yarn I had used misc amounts of. I knew right away there wouldn't be much yarn there for any big project, I did kinda considder just making myself a simple scarf but right now I'm actually in the middle of knitting four scarves to give out to family on Christmas* so between the reality that I probably wouldn't wear a striped scarf in these particular colors and me having enough scarf projects to do anyways... yeah, the idea wasn't particularly appealing

*(GOTTA GET STARTED EARLY, also it's the misc yarn I bought when our yarn shop was shutting down, the stuff I have no idea what to do with. Currently on Scarf 2, I'll probably share photos when all four are done. Eventually. Knitting is slow. So slow I had to do a crochet project between the first two scarfs because I was losing my marbles.)

Now I have Instagram so I can post art there once every six months, I'd hardly considder myself like an Insta user, but sometimes it is kind of nice to browse the things Insta reccomends because there are some lovely things posted on there. A while back, this post of these crochet bags got reccomended to me and they have been haunting me ever since. Like look at them, they're really pretty. And yeah, when I was wondering what I could do with these scrap yarns in particular... The idea of trying to make a bag seemed really fun

And specifically, making a crochet bag with a lining on it, so it'd be like, actually kind of usable. I've never made a bag, not a crochet one nor a sewn one, and I didn't want to up any tutorials or help on how to make a lined crochet bag either, I wanted to just wing it and figure it out by myself (for better or worse) (mostly worse)

So I started the project by just making the actual crochet part of it

This whole thing involved a lot of math, trial and error to figure out the Max Size of the bag I could make (also I wanted to a round bag for some god forsaken reason) with the yarn I had. I didn't have too much of this specific yarn, and I didn't want to buy any more, just use what I already had.

At the time I thought it'd be a good idea to make the "backside" of the bag a plain black, since not only the largest amount of yarn I had was black, but also because it'd be the "inside facing side" that you'd theoretically never see if I wore the bag. In hindsight I regret that decision but we'll get back to that later

I did try out a few different color layouts, tested how many stripes of what colors I could do with the yarn I had (again, math), for some reason this was the one I liked the most though (don't ask me what the numbers mean I can't remember anymore) (something about the stitches/rounds), though I did add one more round since I had just enough yarn for it

But, here is how my pieces turned out. At this point, I had no yellow yarn left and only a Very Very Small Amount of white and black, not enough to do any more rounds or make the bag or the bottom piece bigger/longer, but just enough for some sewing later on

But, with the pieces completed, it was time for me to do the lining

I've had this black fabric for years now, I got it for some project that I never actually did so it had been just sitting around, collecting dust for years, so I'm glad I finally got around to using it.

I laid it down, put the crochet pieces on top, traced them and cut 'em ✂️✨ Followed by sewing them together, a process I did not bother to take photos of because it wasn't particularly interesting.

((Also I had to take a massive break at one point because I realized I really actually needed my mom's serger but that thing was covered in decades worth of tobacco, dust and grime so it needed to be cleaned bad. There was no way in hell I was putting my fabric pieces on that filthy thing. (Also I've never used a serger before so I had to look up tutorials how to use it jdfhjkdfg)))

Once I had put the lining together I washed it (just to get any excess dust and cat hair off it) and ironed it ✨

It looks like an absolute mess, lmao, you can tell I don't do sewing (it almost looks like a tulip... And man, a tulip shaped bag could be super cute...)

But it's fine, because this lining's getting covered in crochet pieces >:)c So ain't nobody gonna see the wonky sewing once it's done! (Also to be fair, big part of the reason it looks horrendous here is because the fabric itself was like, quite floppy. Like there's nothing to hold it up and keep its structure and shape at this point)

Now, one important thing needs to be addressed here. Although at the time I thought this was the best way for me to make the bag, in hindsight I know I should've done the opposite.

I thought it'd be easier for me to first sew the fabric together and then sew the crochet pieces on top, mainly because I believed it'd be harder for me to try to do sewing if the fabric pieces also had the crochet pieces attached to them. Like they'd add bulk to the fabric and increase the risk of me sewing over the crochet and somehow damaging the crochet and/or my sewing machine (or something, I dunno).

And while in theory that might be true, I now know that I would've gotten a much nicer, cleaner looking bag if I had sewed the crochet pieces onto this fabric first, because then I would've been able to add an extra inner lining. You'll see why that would've been prettier a bit later

I just want to point this out because while the way I made the bag works just fine for me, it's not the ideal way to do it, it's not the smartest nor the prettiest way to do it, and I can't reccomend it to anyone. Just wanted to give out this disclaimer, do as I say, not as I do lmao

Anyway, with the lining done, I started working on attaching the crochet onto the fabric with the bottom piece, first pinning it down and then hand sewing it onto the fabric.

Then I did the side pieces. I was careful to start from the middle of each crochet piece, slowly moving outwards to the edges as I was attaching the pieces, leaving the edges unsewn for now...

...because next, I wanted to sew the crochet pieces together. The crochet had more stretch to it, so I figured first sewing them together and then attaching the edges of the crochet to the lining would result in a cleaner look.

Sadly I didn't have much/any yarn left to so I couldn't crochet the crochet pieces together, somekinda slipstitch would've looked much cleaner and prettier, but with the little yarn I had left I didn't want to risk running out in the middle and having to unravel it or something.

So yeah, not particularly pretty, but it worked. And with that done, it was time for me to add a strap to the bag, before I'd go finish sewing the crochet pieces onto the fabric! You'll see why I did this now!

So I had some random ass, thin, black yarn leftover from... something, so I figured I could use some of that up and I did! I made tiny crochet straps and slipped small metal rings (from my mom's hoard) on them, and sewed them onto the bag

Specifically sewed them onto the fabric, didn't want them to be visible on top of the crochet lining (which is why the edges around the bag's opening were still unsewn at this point)

And in the spirit of using things I already had, I have these two straps from one of my old goth pants (though they're actually shorts now). And they just happened to be like, the perfect lenght for an over-the-shoulder bag

No the metals don't match but beggars can't be choosers and it's fiiiiiiine. What matters is that I got a free bag strap without having to make one >:)c

One last thing I did was add some buttons to the bag to hold it closed. I wasn't originally going to add anything but when I tried the bag on, I realized it was just a little too floppy on the opening. I didn't want to try to figure out how to add a zipper or anything, so I grabbed these ancient buttons (from my mom's hoard) and sewed three of them onto the bag, so it holds its shape better

Finished sewing crochet pieces onto the fabric and finished up the very very outer edges as well, and the bag was pretty much done!

Indeed. The inside looks like ass. Although it's mainly just the white yarn that I used, since I didn't want the sewing to be too obvious on the outside I tried to match the thread I used for the sewing to the part of the crochet I was attaching. If I had an inner lining, the inside would look much nicer since all of this would be hidden underneath it, but at this point there was no way in hell I was going to rip these pieces apart just to add a lining, nah, it's fine, it's good enough for me and good enough for my first bag. But yeah, if you want to make a bag, learn from my mistake here

But, with all that done, the bag was done!

And yeah, here you can see why I regret doing the colors the way I did. More specifically, I regret making the bottom white. Like, I thought it would look cool and interesting, and I thought it'd be a waste of the white yarn to use it on "the backside" (the side noone would ever see), and I didn't have enough yarn to make the bag symmetrical on both sides (at least not without severely down playing the part of the yellow yarn in the design).

But in the end, because the bag doesn't hold its shape SUPER WELL, it makes the bottom piece more visible than I expected it to be. Like sewing on the crochet parts did add some structure to it, but it doesn't hold the tin cookie jar shape the way I had hoped it would. So the bottom is much more prominent because of that, and because the bottom part has like, some interest to it with the contrasting colors and whatever, it draws in the eye even more. Like, I really should've just made the bottom piece pure black and used whatever leftover yarns I had to make the backside of the bag.

But, it is what it is. I've made my mistake and now I get to learn from them!

In anycase, here is the bag, despite looking like an absolute mess and not turning out the way I had hoped it would, it still turned out pretty cute.

SHEER COINCIDENCE, I realized that I had this ancient little extra pocket thing (possibly from the same old goth pants as the strap, though I'm not sure, I can't remember) which just HAPPENED to be the exact same size/width as the bag. Like, I did not plan for that at all, but it's the perfect size, so I can straight up just keep the pocket on this bag and use it as an extra, separate compartment if I need one. Lmao, what are the odds

Also the strap from my old pants really is like the perfect lenght for this bag (/me, since I'm short, and it's not adjustable or anything)

Weirdest thing about this project is that it hasn't made me want to make more crochet bags, but it did make me want to learn to do embroidery so I could make custom embroidered bags jkdfhjahgfdg

(Disclaimer, the yarn part of the bag is 100% wool, I don't want to have to deal with washing it, and I don't want to get it dirty, so realistically, I am never going to wear this bag outside dfjghsdjfgh)