This is the post you’ve all been waiting for (or one of them, anyway) – part one of my massive photo dump of shots from GenCon 2013! There are plenty of pictures that I took, with a little assistance from Mr. Crafty Nerd – hope everyone enjoys them! Due to the fact that there are so many pictures, shots from Day 3 and 4 are in a separate post so that way things don’t slow to a crawl here! Enjoy! 😀
Edit 7/2/14: I’ve had a couple requests for help when it comes to terribly tangled manes – and now I have a tutorial for that! You can find it here!
With the very recent release of Princess Twilight Sparkle at Build-a-Bear, and my very very recent (as in, this afternoon) purchase of Twilight Sparkle and her buddy Spike, I figured I may as well get all three of my Build-a-Bear ponies together for a picture – they’re some of the nicest quality ponies I’ve got in my collection, and I do love taking pictures of my ponies! However, when I took Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash off the bed in my office, I noticed their manes were a little less than perfect looking… Pinkie had a few knots in her mane, and Dashie had some flyaways and looked a little messy. I figured it might be a good idea to brush and detangle their manes – and then got the bright idea to post a photo-laden tutorial of the process here! (Granted, this idea hit me halfway through Pinkie Pie, but still…)
So, without further ado…
First things first, you’ll want to pick up a wig brush (or at least a brush with metal bristles) and some wig detangler. I use an old American Girl doll hairbrush, and recently picked up some Brandywine Wig Detangler off of Amazon for detangling the wig that goes with my Pinkie Pie costume.
Wig brush and detangler!
Have a look at Pinkie’s mane – I’ve brushed it a small amount at this point, but you can see it’s still kinda messy – even for Pinkie!
Pinkie after a little bit of detangling – but not much.
Hello all! I hope your Monday went well – mine was a bit of a mixed bag. Ah well. I’ve got a fresh batch of crafty picks for everyone this week!
Speaking of Mondays… this would be a hilarious addition to anyone’s cubicle, haha. It’s in a handy dandy kit, put together by Purple Hippo Stitches, and also part of their Tax Day Sale! I’m half done with my own set, and plan on sticking mine in my cube once it’s done. It’s really simple, and an easy intro to cross-stitching if you’ve never done it before.
I’m going to try something new for the next few weeks here, and see how everyone likes it – I’m going to do a nerdy craft roundup, of four of the most interesting nerdy crafts I’ve found out on the internet! Here’s hoping it brightens everyone’s Monday, and gives everyone some inspiration for some cool craft projects to make.
This looks like a fun project for cross-stitchers, and would also be a great gift for any Doctor Who fan! It would also be a great weekend project, for when you’ve got some episodes of Doctor Who to catch up on. You can find it at The Crafty Companion on Etsy.
Not many people out there know about punch embroidery. To tell the truth, I’d never heard of it until I met my mother-in-law – she makes beautiful punch embroidery pillows, with the help of my father-in-law. (Kathy does the punch embroidery, and Mike sews the pillows.) When Kathy found out I could sew, I was pulled in to help sew the pillows – but I was way more interested in learning how to punch embroider. So, during the first Thanksgiving I spent with Bryan’s family, she taught me how to punch embroider – my first punch embroidery work was Frosty the Snowman, but I quickly came up with ideas I could use to nerd up the craft, so to speak.
It’s actually surprisingly easy to do punch-embroidery. Finding the tools are hard, and the yarn is even harder to find, but once you get the hang of it, it’s addicting and projects can be finished up pretty quickly. It involves simple cotton muslin fabric, thin yarn, an embroidery hoop, and a punch needle – it’s relatively inexpensive to get started with. One of the really neat characteristics of punch embroidery is the neat 3D texture and feel you can get on your projects – the punch needle can be adjusted to different lengths, which makes your design really stand out. You can make almost anything into a punch embroidery image, but coloring book images and line drawings are a lot easier to do, as are cartoon images. Which is where my ideas came in – I started out with making some Sailor Moon pillows, back in 2008.
The Sailor Moon pillows were pretty popular on the Sailor Moon community on Livejournal – I made quite a few of them for people there! I also had some Sailor Moon fabric, too, and that probably made them even more popular, haha. It was lots of fun finding images to turn into pillows, and I loved seeing how things came together as I punched my way to pretty pictures. I also did some Christmas stockings, and some patches for jackets, and even some designs for bags as well. From there, I went and did other nerdy things – including a Doctor Who design (which I’ve been working on for years, haha), and a couple of My Little Pony designs.
If you’ve ever wanted to do punch embroidery, it’s not too hard to pick up – you can purchase materials online, and I plan on making a tutorial video sometime soon – until then, you can check out the following links for supplies and tutorials:
Supplies
Tutorials
If you want to see more of the projects I’ve done with punch embroidery, check out the gallery below!
I’ve only very recently gotten back into the swing of collecting comic books again – when I was a kid, I used to collect Simpsons Comics pretty religiously, and collected stuff that Mixxzine/Tokyopop put out when I was a teenager. However, when I was in college, I sort of fell out of the collecting habit – I’d pick up a few comics here and there, like assorted Pokemon comics and the occasional manga, but not with any sort of regularity.
Then the Sailor Moon manga started being re-released, sometime last year, and I realized that I HAD to get them. I mean, they were re-translated, presented in their original right-to-left format, and published in a sturdier format than the Mixxzine/Tokyopop editions that would fall apart after one or two reads. And then from there, I was lost, haha. Especially when My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic started releasing a comic series. (For those that don’t know me, I am a HUGE My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fan. I mean, come on, I’m sitting here writing this while wearing a Pinkie Pie hoodie and mismatched Twilight Sparkle and Derpy Hooves socks!) Of course I had to start collecting those. And in the process, I started picking up some Adventure Time comics, too.
Oh, so many comics – issues one and two of gender-bending Adventure Time, and a whole ton of ponies. (Plus a bag! Because one can never have too many pony-bedecked project bags, haha.)
When it comes to the MLP:FiM comics, I knew I was going to get those right from the start, as soon as they were announced. I wasn’t sure if they’d be good or not, but hey, if they weren’t, I could at least hang onto the first issue as some sort of collector’s item, right? I read the first issue as soon as I left the comic book shop, and it was good. I mean, really good. It picked up where season 2 left off with one of the villains from the series, Chrysalis (queen of the Changelings), and what she got herself up to in Equestria after our heroines last encountered her. I won’t talk too much about the content of these comics, especially for those who haven’t read them yet and want to – all I will say is that if you enjoy MLP:FiM at all, and enjoy comics, you’ll love the pony comics. And if you’re a comic collector, there are so very many alternate covers out there for each issue – I’ve only been collecting the covers from Hot Topic, but there are far more covers available. Issue one alone has 19 different covers, and issue two has 13! So, yeah. Definitely plenty of reasons to pick up some pony comics.
The Adventure Time with Fionna and Cake comics, those were something of a bonus. The comic shop I visit, Vintage Phoenix, tends to keep their MLP comics on the same rack as they do the Adventure Time comics. When I went in January to pick up my monthly dose of pony, Fionna and Cake were there on the next shelf down – and I love Adventure Time (not nearly as much as I love MLP, though), and figured, what the heck, I’ll give it a shot. I absolutely love the gender-bending story line, and seeing all the opposite-gender counterparts to characters like Princess Bubblegum and Marceline (Prince Gumball and Marshall Lee, respectively) made me giggle. So, when I came in to pick up my comics this month, I added Adventure Time with Fionna and Cake to the pile!
I might do a monthly post about my comic book haul – depends on how many comics I end up getting, whether or not I add manga to the mix (after all, I am still getting those Sailor Moon volumes every other month!), and so on – we’ll see how stuff pans out!