Ideas – Page 2 – Beastie HQ

How to Slay a Dragon

Posted on June 16, 2015June 19, 2021 by crawcraftsbeasties in Crafting, Ideas, Knitted Beasties

Sometimes, projects take longer to come together than you expect. And sometimes they take a lot longer. I thought Beasties with dogs were my big crafting leap forward this year, but that was before I met Dragon Slayer Beastie! I first did the sketches for this commission back in April…

…and back then I thought sketching up the dragon in the first place would be the hardest part!

Dragon Slayer Beastie was requested by a Beastie enthusiast who already has quite a family of little woolly monsters at home. They had attracted the attention of her young neighbour, and when the offer of a birthday Beastie was made, she decided (without any hesitation, apparently) that she’d like a Dragon Slayer Beastie, complete with dragon. As you can see from the sketch, the dragon had to have a golden body, and a silver head and wings. “Hmmm,” I thought. “Could be tricky, but I can probably manage it!”
I figured that seeing a few Shrek and Harry Potter films, plus my current enthusiasm for Game of Thrones, combined with more than a couple of years of experience in sewing my own critters from scratch, would all be ample preparation for the crafting challenges ahead.

You can probably tell where this is going.

It started out normally enough… Making the Beastie herself was a breeze!

As you can see, she’s ready to face down any dragon who dares to cross her path! She’s got a chain-mail top, and she’s armed with a lethal felt sword. Over her shoulder is a quiver of deadly felt arrows, to be used for long-range dragon-slaying missions…

So she had her outfit, and her weapons (in a range of suitably ladylike colours) were complete…

…But where’s the dragon?

Uh-oh. Still stuck in what was proving to be a troublesome prototyping stage.

You see, the nature of the beast meant that I had to step out of my cosy felty comfort zone and use different, unfamiliar materials. And it was only when I started sewing pieces together that I found out how completely different and unfamiliar they were! Fortunately, I had the good sense to reject the gold and silver lycra I had originally planned to use – when I subjected them to the all-important stretchiness test in the shop, they proved themselves to be more suited to making eye-popping party clothes than dragons. If I’d gone with my first instinct, it’s more than likely that this post would be coming to you from within the padded walls of my nearest mental health facility.

So, I went for some less temperamental satin fabrics instead… but even these proved a far cry from the wholesome, homely materials I normally use. First of all, I had to allow for fraying – something you never have to deal with when you use felt! Another of their less charming characteristics is that they show up every little detail, meaning that any slight variations between component pieces are magnified tenfold. Even doing a “rough work” dragon with some leftover calico I had at home didn’t prepare me for making the real thing… Satin fabrics, I have discovered, are designed to drape elegantly, not hold in stuffing. If you’ve ever seen someone wearing a satin dress that was a size too small, you might have an idea of what I was up against. In my quest to tame this dragon, I took on lumpy body parts, misbehaving limbs that stood out at unnatural angles from their joints, twisted tails and floppy spines. I cut, trimmed and rejected heaps of templates…

…Made a few false starts…

…But at last (and we’re talking absolute eleventh hour, down to the wire, seconds-to-spare-before-the-deadline here) I managed to wrangle the various bits into something vaguely dragon-shaped. Here he is snacking on the remains of his vanquished predecessors.

And here he is doing his nicest smile for the camera.

I’d be the first to admit that he’s not perfect. But it’s a long time since I’ve had a craft project flummox me so completely… Every spare moment I had (and some less spare moments… sorry, workplace!) was spent trying to figure out what was going wrong with the templates, or how I could force the wilful satin to do my bidding. The end result may not accurately reflect the late nights, early mornings, miles of unpicked and restitched seams and lungfuls of inhaled satin dust (seriously, that stuff gets EVERYWHERE) that went into making it, but as a learning experience it was hard to beat. I know I have a long way to go before I can claim to be anything other than a paddler in the vast ocean of sewing skills, but I figure that’s a great excuse to go back and perfect some of the basics with simple, fun projects. So, if you have any favourite sewing patterns that would be good practice, I’d love to hear from you! Please share them in the comments… especially if they’re for little critters! I’ll be sure to post the results on the BeastieBlog as I go 🙂

As for Dragon Slayer Beastie and her dragon… the last I saw of them, they were heading off into the sunset to find their new home!

Making Sweet Beastie Music!

Posted on September 10, 2014June 19, 2021 by crawcraftsbeasties in Ideas, Knitted Beasties

Yes, I know Indie Rock Beastie already got a good bit of airtime in my post last week. But I figured that since he is currently involved in helping out with some fundraising, that more than justified giving him a second guest appearance on the BeastieBlog. Plus, we really didn’t get a chance to talk about his guitar.

Guitars are one of the most labour-intensive Beastie accessories to make… every piece is hand cut and hand sewn, and their small size makes this one fiddly task! Also, no two guitar-toting Beasties have ever been given the same instrument. My first one got a bright pink flying V…

…Then I had to make a more Robert-Smith-esque guitar for my Robert Smith Beastie!

I had originally intended to use the same basic template for Indie Rock Beastie’s guitar, but somehow it just didn’t look right. Since I am a stickler for such things/a masochist/insane (delete as applicable), I decided to embark on some research. And I came across this…
Gibson ES 325

(Image from en.audiofanzine.com)

It’s a Gibson ES325, as played (and, I found out later, smashed onstage in a fit of pique) by Kings of Leon frontman Caleb Followill. The one shown in the image above perfectly fitted with my idea of what Indie Rock Beastie should play… and the colour of the body rather conveniently matched some felt in my crafting stash too! How could I resist?

I started by modifying my template to reflect the deeper, more symmetrical shape of this guitar…

… and raided my scraps bag for teeny pieces of felt to make the details! When I’m cutting out felt, I always keep any offcuts – they’re so useful for projects like this one because I can trim them to the right shape by eye, rather than cutting out tiny circles and rectangles from a larger piece of fabric.

Once the guitar body was finished and lightly stuffed, the last stage is to add the strings!

These are run from underneath the piece of grey felt at the end of the guitar’s body, and tied off along the headstock. Then all that was left to do was to place it carefully in the paws of my finished Beastie, and let him do the rest!

Oooh! New Beasties!

Posted on May 31, 2014June 19, 2021 by crawcraftsbeasties in Ideas, Knitted Beasties

For some time now, I’ve been wanting to make a range of Irish Beasties. Of course, my Beasties are already pretty Irish – they are born here, after all. But it always surprises me how little of the yarn we get in this country actually comes from here. And when you have a whole world of beautiful fibres to choose from – South American alpaca, merino wool from Down Under – it’s very easy to take what you have at home for granted.

Fortunately, I recently got a couple of timely wake-up calls. A while ago, some of my knitting friends and I started taking “Knit Days” – we’d hop on a train, or form a convoy of cars, and travel to another town or city to enjoy a crafty day out, usually fuelled by copious quantities of tea and cake. One of these Knit Days took us to the village of Graignamanagh in Co. Kilkenny, which is the home of Cushendale Woollen Mills. This family-owned mill has been producing yarn and finished woollen goods since the mid-1800s, and we were lucky enough to get a full tour during our visit. Since then, I’ve been looking out for a project that would allow me to use some of their products… even more so after I helped my friend with the annual stocktake at her wool shop, and I couldn’t stop admiring the beautiful colours of the Cushendale yarns. I realised that they reminded me of the countryside out in Roscommon, which is where my boyfriend comes from, and somewhere I never get tired of visiting…

Moss, Roscommon Peat Bog on a Cloudy Day

So, I picked out the four colours which I thought best summed up the peat-bog palette, and got knitting! Having completed my first full All-Irish Beastie, I had to give him an accessory… something really IRISH. I could have gone the obvious route – shamrock, leprechaun outfit – but I wanted something a little different, that still reflected everyday life in this part of the world. So he got…

A BIG MUG OF TEA!

Bet you didn’t see that coming… but, no matter who you consult, we Irish always make the top 3 in the world tea-drinking charts.

Our only challengers for the title are Morocco and Turkey, where people must be making cuppas 24-7 to hold us off the top spot. Truly “Irish” tea is made in a teapot, then put back on the range to stew into a viscous tar-like substance, before being thinned out with liberal doses of milk and sugar. But most of us settle for throwing a bag of Lyons or Barrys into a mug and just stirring it around a bit!

More All-Irish Beasties will be landing soon! Let me know in the comments if there are any you’d particularly like to see!

The Making of Justin Beastie

Posted on December 23, 2013 by crawcraftsbeasties in Ideas, Knitted Beasties

It seems I haven’t had much time for blogging over the last couple of weeks. I figured that my days were mostly being absorbed by festive pastimes such as card making, scoping out craft markets and attempting to find presents for my impossible-to-buy-for nearest and dearest, but now that I think about it, a huge chunk of time went on doing commissions.

Because I’m still quite new to the world of crafting for an audience, I didn’t think there would be any difference between making a Beastie that I had thought up myself and making one based on someone else’s imaginings… but weirdly, there is. When I’m inventing something myself, it’s not much of a leap from having the idea to making it. Sometimes the idea and how to make it surface almost simultaneously, or the whole process turns itself on its head and the method inspires the idea, like I was saying in this post. But with a commission, I feel like I need to consider what the person who made the request is expecting to see in the finished article, as well as what I want to do. Also, a lot of the commissions I’ve made over the last week or two have introduced new elements to my Beastie wardrobe, things I might never have considered trying myself. So, they’ve taken a little longer to make, but on the plus side, I’ve stepped out of my comfort zone and learned how to do a whole lot of new things. And that’s always good.

So, that brings me to Justin Beastie. Requested by my friend Adele as a Christmas gift for her boyfriend, she asked for a Beastie with “blond hair, boxy glasses, stubble and some kind of games controller”. I’d already made a Beastie with hair (the Punk Beastie, in this post), but the rest of the project was real “here be monsters” uncharted territory.

As usual, I started off by knitting a Beastie body (with black feet, which would later become a pair of monster-sized Doc Martens boots) and then set about fitting it with a pair of glasses:

Figuring out the size on a paper Beastie head meant I had a handy template to use when I got around to cutting the real glasses out of felt. Once I had all the facial features sorted out, it was time to tackle the stubble. I needed to figure out a way to secure “hairs” so that I could cut them short without making them fall out. My solution? Fix lengths of fine yarn to a piece of material inside the head, and then pull them through. I did a test run first…

And then did the same thing to Justin Beastie’s face!

Following a much-needed shave, and the addition of some hair made from chunky merino yarn, we were almost there!

I gave him a scarf which is a miniature version of one which Adele made for him when she first learned to knit, too. Then he got a haircut, some bootlaces and the requested games controller – a simplified take on the classic NES one. And here he is!

My Beloved Monsters

Posted on December 13, 2013 by crawcraftsbeasties in Ideas

I have to admit, I have a long-held fascination with weird little creatures. Since I’m currently a little short of new Beasties to post, I thought I would take this opportunity to introduce you to some of my favourite monsters…

1. The Muppets

… And by extension, all the characters created by Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop – from Fraggle Rock to Mopatop’s Shop. One of my earliest TV-related memories is of watching “The Muppet Show” with my family, and I’ve been a fan ever since. And while Miss Piggy and Kermit always steal the show, it’s the antics of the monsters in the supporting cast which have kept me watching all these years.

2. Stoppit and Tidyup

Does anyone else remember this? If not, here’s what you missed… Stoppit and Tidyup was a series of short cartoons, which aired in the mid-to-late 80s. Each episode told a story about cheeky red fuzzball Stoppit, his better-behaved friend Tidyup and another of the characters who lived with them in the Land of Do-As-You’re-Told. You can meet them all by watching the show’s intro… and yes, that is TV legend Terry Wogan narrating.

3. The wonderful creations of Dr Seuss

I love the illustrations in Dr Seuss books – try as they might, film adaptations just don’t do them justice. They’re so simple, but they capture everything perfectly. He’s especially good at showing furriness, and his not-quite-human, not-quite-animal creatures always have incredibly luxuriant fuzzy hands and feet. My brother and I got a hand-me-down copy of The Dr Seuss Storybook from our older cousins, and from the first story (“McElligot’s Pool”, featuring pages of fantastic imaginary fish) I was totally hooked.

4. Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland”

Or, more correctly, the part of the 1951 animated film where Alice finds herself in Tulgey Wood. The multicoloured mome raths in the picture are joined by a forest-full of other nonsense creatures, including some pretty imaginative birds.

5. The Creatures of Studio Ghibli

And not just the Totoros, either… although they are a great introduction to the universe of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. Most of the films feature a charming animal sidekick, a backing cast of beasties drawn from Japanese mythology or (best of all) both. Add in some beautifully-painted backgrounds and stories which manage to be heartwarming without descending into saccharine sweetness, and you’ve got a winner. Want to see more? This article handily introduces some of Ghibli’s best incidental characters.

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