Cherry Amigurumi

Hello! Now that Christmas is over I can start telling you about the gifts I made! First up is this adorable pair of cherry amigurumi for my derby friend, Cherry! (yeah, I'm not super original ...)

I used a pattern from Amigurumi Food to make these, which a few minor adjustments.

I wanted my cherries to be bigger than the ones from the pattern, so I used Lion Brand Yarn's Heartland Thick & Quick and Hometown USA yarns, both of which are a super bulky yarn. I used Heartland Redwood for the cherries, and Oklahoma City Green for the steam and leaves. I also moved up to a 8mm hook and used larger safety eyes; the ones I used were about a 20mm diameter. Instead of embroidering the mouths and cheek blushes, I cut light pink felt to shape and glued it on with E6000 - that felt isn't going anywhere now! ~___^

Because I find weaving in the ends quite difficult with super bulky yarns, I attempted to reduce the amount I'd have to do by joining the seams to the cherries before casting on. I'm not sure that it looks as neat as sewing them on would have looked though, so perhaps I'll have to look into acquiring a super big needle for the future.

For size reference, the Fire-King bowl they are sitting in is 18cm diameter, so these cherries are more grapefruit sized ~___^

- Lisa xx

Unicorn and T-Rex Roller Derby Trophies

Hello! As it's coming up to the end of the year, my roller derby league recently had the annual aWARDs ceremony (our league is named WARD, geddit? ~___^), where we recognise excellent contributions to the league! Obviously, we needed trophies, but we had a fairly limited budget. DIY to the rescue!
 

I was originally thinking wood for the bases of the trophies but then I started thinking about cutting thirty pieces of wood ... and sanding them ... and I decided that I didn't want to do that! Plus, not only did I have a limited budget, I also had a very limited time span to actually construct the trophies between work and other commitments (i.e. one day).

 

So I wandered around the hardware store under I stumbled upon the plumbing section and found these push on caps! They are solid white plastic, and pretty cheap! They did come with some raised writing on them, but a quick sand with my Dremel got rid of that! I will note here that if you're going to sand plastic, be sure you wear appropriate safety gear because there was plastic dust EVERYWHERE. A dust mask + goggles are a must, and if you've got one of those CSI style plastic coveralls then that probably wouldn't go astray either! ~___^
 

After sanding (and wiping away all the dust!) I super-glued my animals to the bases. I got my animals at the Reject Shop but unfortunately they didn't have enough horses for the unicorns. So some zebras and donkeys also got re-purposed!
 

I made horns using some Sculpey - I only used a tiny bit from my stash so if you were buying new, one little pack would be more than enough.
 

After baking for about ten minutes on a low heat and letting them cool, I super-glued them onto the relevant animals.
 

And also one dinosaur! Dinocorn? T-rexicorn? Unisaurus?
 

 

A couple of coats of gold spray paint made them look all shiny and special and then all I had to do was stick on the names of the trophies (I printed them onto white card and attached them to the trophies with double-sided tape) and give a quick coat of sealant. 
 

Here they all are, ready to be awarded!
 

Although I made the trophies, I didn't have anything to do with collating the votes to determine the aWARD winners so I was very pleasantly surprised when I was awarded Most Improved NSO! So one of the golden T-Rex trophies came back home with me; we're buddies now.

- Lisa xx