As I am purchasing yarn for amigurumi, I need a way to store it, use it, and keep it clean. I came up with this idea yesterday morning, but I’m sure I’m not the first person to ever think of it. This is a gallon ZipLoc bag, which fits the yarn nicely. I cut off one of the bottom corners, and thread the working yarn through the hole. Then I sealed it.

Anybody remember Underoos? I think I see a few hands out there! My daughter’s each got a set of Wonder Woman Underoos for Christmas one year. I’m guessing this is 1978, which would make the younger one about three years old. I’m sure someone will correct me. They still make a form of Underoos! I found them on Amazon. Apparently they are for adults now.

Yesterday, I made the “body suit” for the fly. It’s made from the same yarn as the hat. I got to learn how to crochet something that is flat and basically rectangular. In addition, this has a pattern to the upper part. I’m not totally sure if it’s right-side out, since I lost track of which was the front and which was the back side of the piece. But other than that, I think I did ok with it!

The pupa was sitting very quitely in the corner of my desk most of the day yesterday. Towards the evening, though, I noticed it rocking a bit. This morning, I saw a pair of little eyes peeking out, and shortly after a beautifully transformed head! Now she is looking much more like an adult Blue Bottlfly with huge red eyes! Seriously, I worked and worked on this hat.

The Entanglement library has a few grid-based tangles now: Huggins, W-2 , Ambler and Emingle. But we have limited control over the grid: we can affect the spacing in the x and y directions, and we can add some random fluctuations to where each intersection on the grid ends up. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could warp the grid in some more dramatic ways? Yes, I thought so too!

Fly Pupa

  crochet bug lalylala

I did it! And with a minimum of frogging! During the pupa stage the white, characterless maggot takes on the form of an adult fly. This is the pupa for my fly amigurumi. I love the way it’s little eyes peek out of the casing! As you can see here, she is just beginning her transformation. After we’re done playing, she will go to sleep and wake up as an adult blue bottle fly.

Fly Egg

  crochet bug lalylala

Well, I think I’m getting a bit faster at making mistakes, LOL! Seriously, this is the little, hooded sleep sack that turns the larva into an “egg”. I learned how to do Half-Double crochets, how to increase them and decrease them. I did NOT learn how to “turn, chain two, hdc 1” very well. I had difficulty with this step. I also messed up the counting for leaving the opening in the sack, so it’s actually in the wrong place.

Fly Larva

  crochet bug lalylala

I’m pretty happy with myself! I manage to get the hat for my fly larva finished with only a few restarts, as you can see below. These went in the bin after I finished the hat and took these pictures. I figured out something about the counting. Since I continuously mess it up, I grabbed the purple, disappearing ink pen that I normally use for sewing. I used it to mark the stitches that had to have an increase/decrease before doing each round.

What was it that spurred me to want to learn how to crochet? It was the book “Beetles, Bugs and Butterflies” by Lydia Tresselet, aka Lalylala! This book is just adorable. It begins with a short story, illustrated with the completed projects from the book. This is followed by the section of Techniques, with very clear information accompanied with lots of great photographs. The next section is full of lots of patterns for making all kinds of things from eggs, to larva, to caterpillars to pupae and full grown beetles, butterflies and other fun bugs.

This week I wanted to talk about something a little different, something only peripherally related to art: Behavioral Animation. Behavioral Animation is a kind of computer animation in which an autonomous object determines its own actions by interacting with its environment according to certain rules. Behavioral Animation is a fairly vague term, which covers quite a bit of ground. The Game of Life A simple example is The Game of Life, developed by John Conway , a British mathematician, in the early 1970s.

Trying Again

  crochet

I can sew. I can knit. I’ve done macrame. And I can do lots of other things. I suck at crochet. I’ve never had anyone around who could teach me. So I have decided, since I’ve seen some cute things, (not grandma doilies,) that I would like to be able to make, to try to actually learn how to do this. I have a few books with cute patterns, and of course, there is YouTube, which can be a good teacher.

Recently, there was a little discussion among myself and some artistic friends about which way animals face when you draw them. Apparently, different people draw them predominantly one direction or another. Perhaps, handedness plays a part in which way we draw them? It was also mentioned that, psychologically, animals facing left appear as more threatening than those facing right. In this little page from my sketch book, I have animals of several kinds.

Wordless 20200909

  wordless

You saw the new Swing Dress that I made for Tuna last week. It still needed a pair of shoes and possibly some leggings or tights to go with it. I wanted to make a pair of t-strap style shoes, a bit on the dressy side, since her dress is a bit fancy. These are what I ended up with. I’m not sure I’m too thrilled with them. It turns out that having black shoes on a leg that is grey doesn’t really provide enough contrast.

Huggins and W-2 have appeared in the Entanglement library! Huggins and W-2 both look like they have been woven but are really just shapes on a grid connected by lines according to a few simple rules. The difference between them is that Huggins connects circles with curved lines, while W-2 connects squares with straight lines. In this post, I’ll talk about how I built Huggins (once you build Huggins, W-2 is pretty easy to add) and show some examples of how both are used.