January 26, 2012

4th Annual Vanna's Choice Contest

Hello World! Sorry I haven't posted in awhile.

This year, I've got some major goals, one of which is to try to complete an orignal design every month. For this month, I worked on a penguin catching a fish entitled "My Only Wish to Catch a Fish."

I decided to enter my design in the 4th Annual Vanna's Choice contest. I started working on this plush on the first of January. It took me about 25 days to complete. I worked on it for about an hour a day. It took a long time, because I was experimenting with some techniques that are new to me and I ended up frogging the feet alone at least 10 times. Thankfully Vanna's choice holds up pretty well. I'm 95% happy with how he turned out. There are always a couple of things in a finished toy that I would tweak, for instance I had a really hard time cutting out the felt for the eyes. Next time I'm going to make a template and use an Xacto knife. I have no idea why it didn't occur to me to do that in the first place.

The hardest part about this project was taking a good photograph. I'm a rank amatuer at photography, so today I cobbled together a light box that cost less than 20 dollars. I still need to make a couple of tweaks to it, but I'll probably post about how I created it. It made it a lot easier to show off the stitch definition in the photograph.

March 25, 2010

Schmancy Olympic Challenge

In January, I entered the Schmancy Olympic Challenge and got assigned the bobsleigh category. It's the first time I've entered one of my designs into a contest of any kind. I'm pleased with my finished object, but I realized when looking at some of the other contestants pictures that I need to buy a light box or light tent to take more professional pictures. You can see the rest of the contestant's entries here. I'm particularly fond of the entry by Herbert and Friends. I don't expect to win.

I got my idea for the design by looking through old winter olympic advertisements. I really liked the look of the poster from the Lake Placid games featuring a bobsled. It's very stylized and I wanted my look to be very minimal, but as usual during the design process my design became very cartoony, partially due to my love of penguins, so I decided that I wanted to really focus on the textures in the piece. I've had a ton of people offer to buy it from me, but I knit this design a couple of times trying to get it perfect, so I'm not really interesting in knitting it again, but I would consider it if someone really, really wanted one. I mostly just do local custom toy orders, but I plan on selling some of my excess toys on Artfire sometime soon. I'm also planning on selling a knitting pattern based on the design. It won't be exactly the same, because I usually knit freeform without making pattern notes, so writing a pattern is kind of daunting for this project.