Monday, March 25, 2013

octonauts, to the launch bay!

We have a new love in this household.  While vacationing at my parents over Christmas, Bugaboo discovered the marvelous Octonauts.  Anyone who regularly watches Treehouse knows what I'm talking about.  To everyone else, it's an adorable tv show aimed at toddlers based on the book series of the same name about eight animals who live in an underwater base and have adventures with the animals around them. "Explore, Rescue, Protect!" is their motto (I love it), plus the kiddies get learn a lot of stuff about sea-creatures.  Anyhow, my point, is that while we usually have way too many toys in the house, just after Christmas we are well beyond capacity.  So when we're playing with lego and my little man starts asking me to build him some octonauts, I decided to make him some octonaut lego.

 It was incredibly simple, I just found eight different coloured lego blocks,
 Printed out a picture of each of the crew,
 And taped them on to the blocks.
 (I have since re-sized and reprinted them so there was nothing hanging over the edges)
 But they shape up to a pretty cute crew!
 And for about 15 minutes of effort, my little guy has a new toy that didn't cost anything, and doesn't take up anymore space than it already had.

Tadaa!

Sunday, March 17, 2013

nautical charts

Ouch!  2012 has not been my year for blogging.  And embarrassingly, 2013 seems to be following suit.  However, I'm not ready to let go yet, and so I stride forth, once again into the blogosphere and give you an update on my crazy cozy life.

I do have a project or two to ready to share, but instead, I have a little giftie.  Remember a long long time ago when I was saying how I was going to do up a nice proper version of the graphs I used to make my octopus hat and pirate ship scarf?  Well, voila, tout finis!

Here's the Octopus Chart (click for full view):


for a finished product that looks something like this:


or this:


And here's the Pirate Ship Chart:

for a little something that will turn out like this:


Yay! (You may notice that my charts are different formats.  Well, I actually had a much more detailed and therefor larger chart drawn up for the pirate ship, but it would have made the scarf too big for my little guy.  I had wanted to giver you that chart as well, but my computer is full of gremlins and the process by which my octopus chart was made would not be duplicated.  I made the small ship chart with a lot of cut and paste blocks; very tedious.)

With any luck, these will be understandable and useful.  Basically, it's just simple intarsia, using two colours for the octopus (the x being one colour and the o another) and three for the ship (the blue squares are supposed to be white, and the blank squares are blue).  Perhaps I will make a tutorial for intarsia one day, but for now, your best bets lay with a 'how to' book or the youtubes!

Happy knitting and if anyone finishes a project with either of these, I would be simply over the moon to see a picture of it!  Nautical charts indeed, oh the cleverness of me!

Ta!