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The Desert Bus for Hope 5 Craft-Along – bonus post

Last week LoadingReadyRun made the official announcement that Desert Bus 5 will begin on November 18, 2011. This closely concerns all you artists and crafters out there, especially those who like to make nerdy, geeky, I <3 Mario stuff. Allow me to explain.

First of all, what is Desert Bus for Hope?

Desert Bus for Hope is an exquisite form of torture. Conceived of and put into practice four years ago by LoadingReadyRun, its goal is to raise absurdly large amounts of money for the Seattle-based children’s charity Child’s Play. The participants of Desert Bus dedicate themselves to playing an infernally boring video game (called Desert Bus) 24 hours a day. The amount of money donated by viewers determines how long this goes on for. And it’s all streamed online for your morbid entertainment.

In order not to pass out from boredom and exhaustion, we at Desert Bus dance and sing and put shoes on our heads. We wear silly hats and play charades and tell outlandish stories. We also auction really cool stuff to raise even more money. A bunch of that stuff is handmade, making it even cooler. And that’s where you come in.

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needle felted mice (or rats)

This week, I have a story for you.

It starts with a scritching noise in the wall behind my desk. Then come scrabbling, scampering and skittering sounds. I call the landlord, he sets a trap, we catch a mouse and that’s that.

Until I see a mouse scurry across the kitchen floor about a week later, which comes on the heels of an afternoon of noise from behind the fridge. Noise that puts one in mind of a large cat or possibly a badger trapped in the wall. The next day I watch a cheeky, whiskered fellow sit and munch on something beneath our coffee table, followed by three of his pals playing peekaboo under the kitchen cabinets. It’s really cute, until I begin seeing mice in every corner of the apartment, every few minutes.

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wet felted Easter eggs

This weekend welcomes yet another celebration of overpriced sugar extravagances and goofy plastic decorations. That is to say, it’s another federal holiday.

Apart from hitting up the post-Easter chocolate sales, I plan to spend some time hanging out with family and eating too much. I was also planning to do a bunch of Easter crafting and maybe play some video games, but because an adorable little nest of sweet springtime mousies decided to make itself at home in our walls, I’ve instead been emptying mousetraps, moving the furniture to have the carpets cleaned, packing up the pantry, washing every dish in our cupboards, emptying the attic and vacuuming little rodent poos out of every imaginable corner.

I imagine that if I decided to dye eggs this year the mice would come out of the walls to nibble on the dye pellets and perhaps bathe themselves in the little bowls of coloured water. At the very least they’d no doubt have the nerve to get themselves SNAPPED in a trap right as I was dipping an egg, causing me to jump and inadvertently dye a patch of carpet pastel pink. Either way, I’ve avoided any possible egg-dying trauma by making another kind of Easter egg this year: a wet felted one.

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felt circle flowers

I just looked through all my recent posts and realized that the last 3 (not including the Scaled Wurm bonus post) have been about crafts done with felt. I’m beginning to appear obsessed. In the interest of continuing to be unbalanced, this week’s post is also about a felt craft, but I promise to post a non-felt craft for next week. Maybe. And you could do this week’s craft with paper, if you wanted.

The world of fashion – to which I pay mild sporadic attention – seems to be going through a headband fad at the moment, and I’ve realized that this is one of the only hair accessories I can pull off on my short-cropped head. As with all fads, it’s best to jump on and enjoy it while it’s here, because it probably won’t last. Luckily, many of the headband styles that are so very in right now are ridiculously easy to manufacture at home. Bands featuring colourful flowers or bows or half the plumage of some exotic bird are pretty simple to make yourself. Well, maybe not the bird one, unless you live a few blocks from a park housing wildly roaming peacocks, like I do. They get pissy when you tug on their feathers, though.

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Scaled Wurm – bonus post

So, after hours of pattern re-making and sewing on colourful scales one by one, I’ve got another Magic the Gathering plushie project to show off. This was made for a friend who has a special fondness for the card Scaled Wurm, which figured prominently in his Ice Age deck, back in the day. Like the Perilous Myr plushie, Mr. Wurm is made entirely from felt, which is absolutely my a favourite material and the best thing ever and I’d probably build an entire world out of it if I had the time. One day.

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felt fortune cookies – geekified (and a giveaway!)

It’s April! Which has nothing even remotely specific at all to do with fortune cookies, but they seemed a fun thing to make. I’ve seen these felt fortune cookie creations all over the internet, made for Chinese New Year parties or Christmas or Valentine’s Day or pretty much any other occasion.

I like to geekify things, and it occurred to me that Mario has at least a couple of phrases that are very obviously well-suited to the tradition of handing out short and to-the-point fortunes and bits of wisdom. (I’m not saying that the repurposing of these phrases is in any way original, just that it’s thematically appropriate.) So I thought I’d see how Mario mushroom felt fortune cookies would turn out. The answer? Brilliantly. I think I’ll start a box of Mario-themed decorations etc, for the day they finally declare a national holiday for the game. Seems like a far more interesting celebration than Presidents’ Day, after all.

Below are instructions for normal, everyday felt fortune cookies, as well as for the Mario mushroom version.

Also, at the end of the post I’m doing a giveaway. Find out how to enter (via a comment) to win a box of random stuff!

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plush baby Myr


Ah spring. That magical time of year when the air smells of poo from all the fertilizer the city dumps on public flower beds, and the trees send sneeze-inducing spores dancing on the wind. We’re moving into a season associated with sweet baby creatures gambolling in green fields. Sweet baby creatures that, as the birds and bees will tell you, must come from somewhere.

In the case of baby Myr, that somewhere is your sewing machine. If you’re tired of the usual, clichéd flocks of fleecy lambs and zigzagging parades of chirping ducklings, why not grace the world with more Myr. A basketful of these often-overlooked members of the adorable-creatures club will set you apart from all the Martha Stewart style homes bedecked with paper maché birds nests and napkins folded into bunny rabbits.

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