Stuff I have made recently, for your viewing pleasure

As some of you may be aware, I have been job hunting for the last month or so. Apparently job hunting makes me want to be crafty. So here's a compilation of pictures of what crafty things I have made while avoiding looking for jobs. Also, apparently this is a viable strategy for finding employment, because I now have a new job starting in about a week.

What is this, you may ask? 

It's a thing that goes under the door to block light and sort of block sound maybe a little bit.

I totally made up the pattern for that thing as I went along, but it is basically foam insulation for 1/2 inch pipes covered in fabric, and then the part that goes under the door is stuffed with fiber fil to make sure it goes all the way up to the bottom of the door because there's about a 1 inch gap. It's prettier and more convenient than the blanket we were using before, and now I can use the blanket as... well, a blanket instead.

On to the next one...

DOTA 2 Pillow!

Side view of the DOTA 2 pillow

This one is entirely for my husband, who plays quite a bit of DOTA 2 to unwind after finishing all his school projects. It's just fleece for the fabric, cut into a square, sewn together, flipped, and stuffed with fiber fil. For those who have never played DOTA 2 (including me), this is the logo that shows up on Steam when you go to launch it. I made this pattern up too, sort of; I printed out the DOTA 2 logo and used it as a template.

Fingerless gloves

Since I get really cold hands when I sit at the computer all day, I made myself these fingerless gloves out of cotton yarn that I had no other plans for. Pattern here. Buttons are from Joann's.

Atmos from Final Fantasy V in perlers

Ahh, back to perlers. This is a boss from Final Fantasy V, Atmos. I was very happy with how it looked in the end with our color choices, and it looks even better now that it's ironed.

IT Crowd perlers

And last but certainly not least, the IT Crowd characters. If you haven't watched The IT Crowd yet, it's a pretty funny show about people who work in IT. (I will issue a language/content warning though; it's not something I'd show to children.)

Not pictured are the 8 hand warmers (little fabric bags filled with rice that you can heat up for cold days) that I cut out the fabric for a year ago and never finished. I finally finished them. Even though it doesn't get that cold here. 

Also in progress: a crochet granny square rug that is nowhere near completion yet. I'll try to make some more headway on it soon. I have about 25% of the squares done so far. I work on them while I watch the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which apparently everyone else has heard about before I did. At any rate, they make for decent entertainment while I crochet the same thing over and over again. Unfortunately, I am 75% of the way through this little snippet of entertainment, and not 75% done with the granny squares.

On the non-crafty side, I found a recipe for some really delicious peanut butter popcorn. Recipe copied below for your convenience. 

Spread 10 cups popcorn on a baking sheet. In a small saucepan over medium low heat, combine 1/2 cup honey and 1/3 cup sugar. Simmer, stirring frequently, until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat and stir in 1/2 cup peanut butter until melted, then mix in 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. Pour over popcorn and toss well to coat. Let cool before serving.

I also personally like to put salt on it too after pouring the goop over the popcorn. And as a side note, 10 cups of popcorn is about 1/3 c of unpopped popcorn kernels. 

And with that, I'm out.

A few of our more ambitious Perler projects in the last few months...

The Kirby post was only a taste of what we've been up to lately, but I can tell I'm not going to be good about regularly posting pictures of our past projects, so this is an overview of our most ambitious projects since May. (Well, some of them are less ambitious than others, but all are cool.)

3D Scene from Final Fantasy IV - Palom and Porom turn to stone to save the rest of the party. This one was a lot of fun to make but required some tricky modifications to change it from 2D to 3D. I'm pleased with how it turned out though.

Atma weapon from Final Fantasy VI - truly a beast to iron. Pun intended. Cart included for scale.

Majora's Mask (Zelda)

Our first canvas piece, from Super Mario World. I'm very happy with the finished product.

Who doesn't want a set of Tetris pieces on their wall to arrange in the perfect configuration?

And last but certainly not least, Luna from DOTA2. (fan sprite) We had to do some substantial color modification on this one to make it work, but I think it turned out really well.