This is the giant post of boyfriend craft

Over the last year or so, I have been making various pieces of crafty awesome for my boyfriend (also awesome). But I have been exceptionally lax in blogging these creations. So, in an extremely tardy fashion, here are some of the geeky boyfriend crafts I have made over the last year:

Birthday! A quote from his favorite Terry Pratchett character, Sam Vimes, from the book Night Watch – the flowers at the bottom are lilac blossoms, which are seriously plot-relevant in the book.

Also, a cross-stitched triceratops birthday card! The triceratops is from from Makoto’s Cross-Stitch Super Collection, which has fantastic mini-designs.

Christmas! Cthulu cross-stitch from Needlenoodles, and Zombie Vampire from Zombie Felties. We had at the time been playing a lot of Arkham Horror; on reflection, that fed heavily into my crafty psyche. Plus, cutesy Lovecraftian nightmares and steampunk-style zombie vampires are just cool, y’know?

Valentines Day: a heart, of course! I stitched this ages ago, but could not pass it over as a Valentines gift: it just struck the right note between geeky and romantic.

Anniversary! A Weighted Companion Cube from Nerdigurumi (and also, well, Portal). Made after we began cohabiting, and therefore crocheted in secrecy, at odd times and in weird places. Stitched with love and weighted with glass beads, your Weighted Companion Cube will never threaten to stab you.

Aaaaaand birthday again! A hand-embroidered felt d20, of my own devising! Again stitched as a covert operation. The project began as a crocheted d20, but in the end, felt was a much more manageable medium, especially with that much embroidery and sewing-up. While it’s not entirely game-legal, it does roll surprisingly true!

 Also, I made a Jaffa marble cake with dark chocolate ganache. It was delicious!

Needless to say, we are well suited in our geeky tastes.

 

Giving the gift of creepy crafts

Two of the guys in my D&D campaign had birthdays recently; creepy gifts were clearly the order of the day.

One gift was made at extremely short notice – Facebook informed me that it was his birthday at about 3pm, and I had this zombie undertaker whipped up by about 4:30pm. Whatever else you say about Zombie Felties, those little critters are goddamned swift to make.

I was a little more organised for the other gift. The goal was to crochet an extremely creepy blue-grey monkey;  the recipient’s character in our D&D campiagn owns just such a monkey. It has a complex backstory and answers to the name of Patrick. After may hours of solid crochet work and some consultation with the Dungeon Master, it was decided that this is Patrick:

Patrick was made from PlanetJune’s fuzzy monkey pattern, with a lot of the cute exchanged for extreme creepiness. The limbs and tail are fully wired and poseable, and the muzzle has handcrafted metal teeth (another plot point from the D&D campaign). Patrick can now be found assulting random stuffed dolls and statuettes all over his new owner’s house.

 

My friends get the weirdest birthday presents

Two of my friends had a joint birthday this weekend, and I wanted to craft something disturbing for each of them.

I asked one what she would like me to crochet for her birthday. Her reply? An ubervamp. Since we had, in fact, spent the previous weekend singing along to the Buffy musical episode, Once More With Feeling (which we both know by heart), all was understood, and away I went.

Visual references on the internet proved to be inadequate, so I was compelled to rewatch Buffy season 7. For, you know, the ubervamp research. Clearly.

This disturbingly adorable Turok-han is the result:

Adapted from the Nosferatu pattern in Creepy Cute Crochet, this misshapen, glistening-fanged, red-eyed monstrosity was happily received into its new home, where it now lurks on top of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Collector’s Edition Box Set.

My other friend was less immediately decisive, so I decided for her. After all, what better gift for a cat person than a Zombie Kitty?

This extremely cute undead kitty is from the book Zombie Felties, a nifty collection including zombiefied puppies, ducks and bunnies.

It’s a good thing I have weird friends, otherwise they might look at me funny when they unwrapped their gifts…

 

Oh, the horror…

On the last Friday of October, there was a swap over at Phat Quarter, with very apropos horror-mashup theme. My piece has landed safely with its recipient, so I can now reveal my zombie/meme mashup:

 

The photo doesn’t quite do it justice; the cross-stitching is incredibly dense – it’s done with 3 strands of DMC, stitched on 18ct AIDA. The gravestone alone took a whole skein of grey. The fabric doesn’t even bend…

The text, of the other hand, is totally unstitched. I decided to try to make it look it was carved into the stone, so I had a go at creating text from negative space. I have to say, it was trickier than I thought it would be; my brain just didn’t want to invert.

The design process for this was a bit convoluted – the gravestone was simple enough, once I picked a font, but I was stumped on the zombie hand for ages. I knew how I wanted it to look, I just couldn’t get it happening. Eventually, I posed my own hand in a zombie-style claw, took a photo, and then manipulated the hell out of it until it was two-toned and charted. Ta da!

The last stuff to go on was the grass and grave-dirt; I pretty much just free-handed this lot and hoped for the best :)

If anyone’s interested in making their own bad-zombie-pun cross-stitch, I’ve posted the pattern over here.