Bucket Cozy!

This is our bucket.

We have a five gallon bucket in our dining room.  It is not because I hate doing dishes and prefer to throw our slops in a bucket to later toss to seagulls.  In actuality, we keep a fish tank on our sideboard table and trying to siphon-clean a 10 gallon tank without a bucket for the water to go into is messy business.  Hence our very unfashionable bucket.

So why not make a cozy for it?  Yup, a cozy for a Home Depot bucket.  And it’s for our fish so only one thing came to mind.

Before

Bucket sushi!

Tah-dah!  Salmon and avocado roll with roe!

Let me start by saying I am wholly embarrassed to admit just how long this took me.  I mean, damn.  Sure, I’ve got cripple hands and all that but really.  I cranked out most of it pretty fast, but the one thing that took forever was the salmon.

Curse you, salmon, and your teeny stitches.

Like a complete asshole, I didn’t want the salmon to have the same stitch texture as the avocado so instead of crochet stitches I made the whole thing with slip stitches.  For those of you who aren’t hook aficionados, a slip stitch is kind of like going to make a crochet stitch, forgetting to crochet, and then moving on to the next loop.  Instead of making a nice little knot, you basically do nothing.  So it took me 2 WEEKS.  Oy.  But overall, I’m happy about how this little bucket cozy came out.

More pictures!

The Baby is uninterested in giant sushi. Maybe if it was a carrot.

It's nice that she's just about the same size as the fish.

The idea of giant carrot cozies makes The Baby pensive.

Maybe camera is made of carrot?

Skeleton In Progress

Howdy.

Last Halloween season (the best season) I had decided that I wanted to make a skeleton to keep around the house.  I found a couple of tutorials for making your own skeleton out of paper mâché and decided, yup this is totally doable.  Had I worked with paper mâché since elementary school?  No, not at all.  But sure, what the hell.  Funny how I’m writing about this in progress skeleton in February.

Baby seems slightly suspicious of her new friend.

The hardest part was that all the tutorials called for you to measure the proportions against your own body.  Now, I guess you could say I am proportionally challenged.  Or skeletally deformed.  You pick.  But I do know that having seen a full body image of my skeleton (go, medical testing, go!) that it looks majorly wonky.  My wife said it looked like a computer tower with legs.  That’s me.  So I tried to wing it and ended up with a skeleton fit for Andre the Giant and we didn’t quite have room for 7 feet of paper mâché.  So I said screw it, and decided to just re-create my own much smaller skeleton.  Hence why it is shaped like a computer tower on legs.

He seems even lazier than she is.

So far, I have the bones, except for hands and feet, all set out and connected.  I have paper mâchéd the ribcage.  With the exception of the spine, the joints are articulated.  Still working on it and hope to have him ready by this Halloween.

I think he and the Baby are becoming fast friends.

RARE GUINEA PIG ACTION SHOT!

The Christmas Cock

Yup. It's a cock. I wasn't kidding.

So, I’ve got this friend, a certain Mr. Bman, and I wasn’t sure what to get him for Christmas.  Funds were tight so I decided to make him something.  But what would he really like?

The answer that came to me about .003 milliseconds later was a crocheted cock.

I did not have a pattern for a crocheted penis.  I don’t know why that doesn’t come standard in crochet books.  Weird.  But I did have a pattern to make a wine bottle to get at least a starting point.  Wine first, penis later.  Sound familiar?

Crafter’s Tip: When crocheting a dick off a wine bottle pattern be sure that you are crocheting from the right end.  I followed the directions thinking I was making the wine cap and it wasn’t until I had a flat circular disk the size of a dessert plate before I sat back and thought, “This isn’t the dick I was looking for.”  I had crocheted the bottom of the bottle.  Oopsie.

Once I figured out how to read, I crocheted the tip, ad-libbed the rest of the head (I really wanted him to look uncut) and then made up how to do the rest via trial and error.

I attached a length of yarn to back to that you could tie it around your waist and wear it for the full effect.  When I was done I had this really nice looking cock.  I was like, damn, I would wear this around.  It’s a little too big to be a realistic packing cock, but it would be a fun packing cock for sure.

See, but Mr. Bman really likes to draw dicks.  Big dicks, weird dicks.  Dicks with gnarly veins and wiry pubes.  So I had to Bman-mod this dick with some veining embroidery (how often does that phrase get used?) and I destroyed some black yarn and stitched it in.

I stuffed the shaft solid (man, this is just too fun to write) so that it can sit flaccid or stand erect.  The scrotum I left empty except for two tightly packed fabric balls, appropriately positioned.

Okay.  Enough chatter.  Let’s see some more pictures.

Not quite ready for cock push ups, but I'm making progress.

I feel like the angle on this one is really special.

It was going to happen. Why fight it?

I plan on making a bunch of these.  I’ve got another started right now, though the colors aren’t exactly “traditional.”  So keep an eye out for more crocheted dicks up for sale!

And if you’re curious about the dude who made me think to make something like this, go to the blogroll at the top of the screen and click on either Marsupial Jones or The Waysiders Podcast.

As you may have noticed, this was a guinea pig-free post.  My sidekick was busy with some business to do with the Guinea Pig Mafia.  I recall hearing the words, “Peru” and “revenge.”  So, she was too busy to help me out on this one.  Also guinea pigs and dicks really shouldn’t ever appear in the same picture.

Hand warmers in progress

So the mugwump has a wife and said wifey gets cold hands.  And really likes colorful stripes.  Hand warmers, ahoy!

Thumb holes measured out with super classy things like paperclips.

Wifey picked her favorite color for the sewing yarn. Baby assisted.

Needs thumbs, don’t you think?  I’ve never crocheted thumbs.  I don’t have a pattern so I just threw in some stitches and crocheted the damn thing around my own thumb and made the wifey try it on like 47 times.  Had to rip it out a bunch of times but that’s how my process goes.

Then she threw in that she’d like some mitten tops so they could be indoor/outdoor handwear.  Never made mitten tops before, but here I go.

 

It's so hard not to put the mitten top on the guinea like it's a butt warmer or something.

And that’s where I am so far.

My Taoist Afghan.

This afghan started as having several trash bags full of yarn of way too many colors.  It was the first thing I ever crocheted.   I picked a color and started until I felt like it was time for another.  No pattern or plan.

It’s super cozy and I’m pretty sure if you were to wave it in the air fast enough you could give yourself a seizure.  Which I think is an important feature in an afghan.

Baby says, "Yo."