Captain of this boat

Heeeeeeeere's Noah!

He's all complete, but he refuses to stand up.  I think he's got into the wine a bit early.  Doesn't he know he didn't get drunk until AFTER the Flood?

I'm making the second bear now.  My poor first bear has been looking very lonely, so I think he needs a friend.  After that I'll make Mrs Noah.

I've worked out how to make the Ark as well.  It will be a round blanket and I'll make it with a draw-string around the edge so all the animals can be bundled up into it and it can be gathered up and put away.  The base of the rug will be sky and water, with the rainbow as the border on the top (sky) half of the rug.  The Ark itself I will make separately and sew on, like an applique.

And a new look

Oh, yeah, and I decided to give the blog a facelift.  I think books are more me than a bunch of random lemon and lime spots.

There's a bear in there.

My first Noah's Ark animal is complete!  Half of the Bear Pair is done.  I actually finished him a day or two ago, but didn't have the right type of eyes, so I had to go and buy some.  That was actually a good thing, because I wasn't aware you could get the oval shaped eyes.  I'd only ever used the round ones before, so there's something new for me.  :)

As it is, there will be a slight pause on making another addition to Noah's Ark, due to the fact that I have been reminded that I promised to make a friend a Dalek back in January and still haven't done so.  As a result I am now making said Dalek, which is definitely a lot trickier than the bear, but I should have it done in another couple of days and then I can get back to my next Ark inhabitant, which happens to be Noah himself.

Noah's Ark

Well now.  Here we are, then.  I've managed to drag this old blog out of the ether of the internet, in order to document my progression (or lack thereof) on my new project, a crocheted Noah's Ark.  As you can see, this blog was last used in 2009, and it was a project for a course I was doing in TAFE (Library Technician.  I didn't finish it because I got a job as an optical dispenser.  Go figure.).  As a result the old posts talk about stuff I was learning then and have now mostly forgotten.  Feel free to ignore those posts completely.  No doubt at some point I'll go through and delete them, but right now they make the blog look a bit more productive, so they can stay there.

Noah's Ark.  My ambitious new project.  I have plans to make numerous pairs of animals (no, I'm not going to go with the '7 pairs of clean and 1 pair of unclean'), including bears, tigers, camels, donkeys, hippos, rhinos, elephants, lions, giraffes, monkeys and others.  There will be no insects or anything smaller than a snake, so don't bother offering suggestions because I will rudely ignore them.  Originally I thought to make them as realistically as possible, but fiddling around in an attempt to make a realistic looking bear has convinced me that life is too short and I should just stick with the patterns I have.  I do want the animals to all be pretty much of a like size, around 15 - 20 cm, so may have to do some adjusting on some patterns to get that to work.  I have to adjust a few patterns to make some animals.  The pattern for the lion will also make tigers, as long as I add in stripes and leave off the mane, and I'm using a panda pattern for the bear, but making it in brown.

This project will no doubt take months, or even longer if I get bored and want to make something else in the interim.  The animals will be the easy bit.  It's the Ark itself that will be REALLY tricky.  I haven't even thought about that, but a couple of suggestions have been to make it in felt, or even make (or get made) a wooden one.  Both definite possibilities, to be thought about at a later date.

So why am I doing this?  No real reason, just because I can.  A challenge, I guess, both to my crocheting skills and to my attention span.  Actually, more to my attention span, since I've made several of these animals before, so that side of things is the easy bit.  I have a tendency to start things and not finish them (don't we all?), but this one I really want to do, and having the blog, and hopefully followers, will keep me honest.

My first animal is a bear.  I will post pictures of each animal as I go, so all things being equal I should be able to put a picture up in a day or two.

T minus 40 minutes

In 40 minutes our last class begins. Am I nervous? Nah. Am I apprehensive? 'Course not! Am I wishing I had a terrible migraine or some other excellent excuse for staying in bed all day today? Maybe a little bit...

Alright, quite a lot.

I've looked back at the questions we are required to answer in this presentation, and I am quitesure I've answered all of them in the various blog posts, except for why I have not used any print tools. Well, that's simple: There's hardly any out there! Amigurumi is very new, and while there are a few pattern books availalbe in English, you could probably count the number on both hands. There are a lot mroe in Japanese, but since I have precisely NO knowledge of how to read Japanese I can't really make much use of them. There are, however, *truckloads* of internet sites, blogs, you-name-its out there about Amigurumi. I could have cited one of my pattern books, but since it's more of a leaflet than a book, and has no real publishing information beyond the yarn company sponsoring it, it wouldn't be much good. Besides, using the internet meant I could also take a break every-so-often and have a quick game of Freecell or Spider Solitaire when the brain demanded a break.

So that's it! Here endeth the presentation, and with a bit of luck and a fair wind I've actually done it all properly. I now finish this post off at T minus 30 minutes and think longingly of the lunch provided today. Tehre may be no such thing as a free lunch, but this is close enough!

All done....hopefully

I was pretty sure I hadn't recorded my citations correctly, but wasn't sure what changes I needed to make. I emailed Leonie yesterday, but she's ill, poor thing, plus the Polytechnic was having computer issues, so she couldn't check my blog to tell me. I was starting to be slightly apprehensive about it (read: mad flat panic) until I checked my iGoogle page and saw Sarah had updated her blog with a couple of citations, so I googled the citation maker she used (Easybib) and had a crash course in citing websites. Phew! Thanks HEAPS, Sarah! I've now edited my blog posts and added in what I sincerely hope to be correct citations. That'll teach me to pay more attention to that part when it's discussed in class.

Oooh, I'm clever!

Last week in class we learnt about RSS Feeds, which was simpler than I expected. I was already following an Amigurumi blog (1) through this blog, but now I'm following it through my iGoogle homepage and the RSS Reader. I'm getting to be so high tech!

Ana Paula is one of the best Amigurumi designers out there. She is a South American living in New Jersey, and I have discovered that it seems a surprising number of 'Amigurumists' (my word for those who make Amigurumi) come from South America. There are a lot of blogs and web-pages from Japan, where it originated, and the USA, which is expected because the US is the crafty capital of the world, but I am really surprised at the number of Spanish speaking sites out there, most from Chile and Peru, but some from other South American countries. Most of these sites are also in English, but the bloggers first language is Spanish. I just thought that was an interesting bit of trivia.

The other thing we learnt in Thursday's class was how to make a power-point presentation, complete with imbeded video. My 14 year old son was actually (reluctantly) impressed with that. He can make power-point presentations, but doesn't know how to imbed a video. My computer geek husband, however, simply said: "Yeah? And...?" Some people are just impossible to impress, unless you are wearing sexy lingerie and nothing else!

(1) "Ana Paula's Amigurumi Patterns and Random Cuteness." Ana Paula's Amigurumi Patterns & Random Cuteness. 12 July 2009. 30 June 2009 http://amigurumipatterns.blogspot.com/.