Houston, we have....Eyestalks.

Regina, the beauteous, beneficently evil mastermind behind Monster Crochet, has granted me a boon!

I wrote her to inquire about using her delicious eyeball pattern as a character in my film. She assented, and I received the pattern yesterday evening. Thank you, Regina!

Looking over my stash of thread, I think I should be able to come up with some wonderfully twisted Beholders. What could possibly be wanting now?

Oh, yeah. A pattern for the knitted Ilsensine. Ghah, I really need radioactive green yarn now...

THE BRAIN SLUG?

Hooh, boy. The first run of this little monster did not turn out as intended. The Brain Slug, of Futurama fame was supposed to look like this little guy here on the left.


However what I ended up with, after knitting the thing on US #5 needles, more closely resembled a Vlassic Willy Warmer than anything from outer space.




I chose the smaller gauge due to my stash-busting choice of lurid green sportweight yarn. The stitches cannot look too open, otherwise the stuffing will be visible through them. On reflection I think the wiser choice would be to up the gauge, and use two strands of yarn. The sample looks like it was knitted in a worsted weight. I never thought I'd ever hear myself say this, but I wish I had some yarn in "radioactive green" right now. Not that the yarn color has anything to do with the shaping of the monster in question; I just think it would show up on video better.

Ah well, back to work...

Off Topic -Viva Piñata

In my daily life I'm not just an artist, I'm a computer nerd.

That's right, I said it.

As I scan the release date lists of upcoming computer games, I notice that on the Xbox Live site, Viva Piñata is cheerfully vague - Holiday 2006?? Does that mean before, or after Thanksgiving?

For me it isn't a question of will-there-be-a-copy panic. It's already been preordered. What I'm currently feeling is more akin to the impatience of a 5 year old waiting for their birthday or the holidays. Viva Piñata promises to waste more of my time and brainpower than even Sid Meier's Pirates did - and you know I disappeared for nearly three straight weeks to terrorize the Carribean when that came out.

It has been a while since a building sim game has captured my imagination like this, the release of Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile being the most memorable. If you like sims, or like anything to do with Ancient Egypt, you will want to play that game. The graphics are gorgeous, the gameplay is rich and interesting. The designers paid careful attention to the history of the culture, and that always wins big points with me. VP may not have all the complexity of CotN, but it has enough robust features that I think one could play it for a good while without being bored by it. I'm hoping, anyway. VP was one game I really wish I'd been on the beta test list for. Sigh.

Anyway, I'll let you folks get back to your regularly scheduled reality while I knit nervously, awaiting the latest delivery of junk food for my brain. After all, we must have monsters.

IN THE BEGINNING...

About oh... twenty years ago when I was still a rugrat in school, some classmates and I were enthralled with stop-motion animation. Gumby and Pokey, Davey & Goliath, that sort of thing. Ideas were exchanged, stories were scribbled in notebooks, but sadly it went no further. Being all of thirteen, none of us had access to the necessary technology to edit together a short film back then.

Cue the 21st century.

My current project idea burst upon me as a way to find a use for all the "useless monsters" I've been knitting out of end bits of stash yarn. It's logical, right? I mean, if you don't have little kids or pets who eat these things faster than a black hole gorges on a neutron star, or work for a cereal company where you could stuff them into boxes as the "prize inside", what else are you going to do with them?

Past monsters I've made were of my own design. Some of them look like they could work for film; others....not so much. I polled my friends at Knittinghelp.com to find the best monster patterns out there. In came a treasure trove of suggestions! Some were specific to genre (Lovecraftian), others looked like they could be more malleable and used in a variety of stories. So I'm going through the collection - holding auditions, screen tests, and whatnot, trying to find that elusive knitted beastie with enough star quality to play the hero(ine) in this first feature.

Stay tuned for future developments!