During your internet wanderings, you may have come across “bead sprites”; recreations of classic 8-bit video game sprites made using plastic beads which fuse together when heated. This month, I’ll run through both how to make your own bead sprites and how to turn the finished result into fridge magnets.
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I’m in the process of moving into a new house, and am having a lot of fun decorating. For the first time, I’ve got an office room that doesn’t have to do double-duty as a guest bedroom – which means that it can do double-duty as a gaming hangout, instead! I’ve got my desk in place and bookcases lining the walls, and I’m currently hanging photos and art. It’s a great opportunity to engage in some geeky crafting. Especially since I came across a stack of old game manuals while I was unpacking…
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One of my many slightly weird hobbies is making one of a kind (ooak) fashion dolls. This means, basically, that I take mass-produced plastic fashion dolls (such as Barbie dolls), then alter them by restyling or rerooting their hair, stripping off and/or adding paint to their faces, remolding limbs and making new outfits. It can be a pretty involved process. Some of my dolls took me weeks or months to complete, and I know a few ooak artists who do handmade chain mail armor and tiny forged weapons for their dolls in addition to fully hand-sewn original outfits, which can take months. Doing totally custom dolls is really fun, but it’s definitely not a project for the occasional crafter.
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The inspiration for this month’s Craft Check came from my current tabletop game, where the players and I are using some of the polymer clay tokens that I taught you how to make in “Make Your Own (Easier) Miniatures.” One of the women in my game is playing a character who just obtained a mount, and we’ve spent several sessions representing the horse on our battle grid with scraps of cardboard, large dice, and anything else roughly the right size that comes easily to hand. It works well enough, but the random object solution to the mount problem is hardly elegant.
So I came up with a better answer.
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If you’re like me, you have a lot of gaming geek t-shirts. And if your t-shirt collection is like mine, there are plenty that have bleach stains on them, or holes, or are otherwise unwearable except on laundry day. If there’s an image on the shirt that you like, though, you can recycle it into a nifty patch for a geek-punk jacket easily – no sewing skills required!
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For the thirteenth Craft Check column, I thought it would be fun to go back and revisit all of the crafts featured in Cerise this year and share some ideas for elaborations and variations. So if you’ve tried some of the crafts and want more, or if you’ve been holding off and waiting for more inspiration, be sure to check out all the ideas in this column!
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I was browsing through a craft store the other day and saw these awesome beads. Brightly colored, translucent dice! They’re way too clunky and plastic-y for classy earrings or anything like that, but the bright, 80’s-style colors reminded me of a different kind of jewelry, one that was really popular when I was a kid: friendship bracelets.
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Back in our very first issue, I told you all how to make your own miniatures. Since then, I’ve had lots of people tell me that they love the idea of sculpting their own miniatures, but don’t have either the time or the sculptural creativity. I just started running a new game and I wanted to use something a little more personalized than extra dice or plastic tokens on the battle grid, but didn’t have time to create elaborate new miniatures for every character. So I came up with a method for doing very simplified “miniatures” that may appeal to those of you who find the original “Make Your Own Miniatures” tutorial too daunting.
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What makes a princess? Is it the heritage? The upbringing? The attitude? Nah – I think we all know it’s the tiara! This particular tiara is a special one: it’s a (very) simplified version of the one I made for Robyn to wear at her wedding [Editor’s note: see “Just Gimme the Tiara,” in this issue]. Although that tiara was much fancier, you can see the beginnings of it in this straight-forward design. It’s also tremendously versatile, appropriate for princesses of any age, gender, or personal style.
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I improvised this fingerless “glove” (they would be more properly called wrist-warmers, I believe) pattern when my heater broke down one winter semester and I had a lot of papers due. I needed something that would help keep my hands warm, but which left me freedom of movement so that I could type. Later, I discovered that these gloves work as well for gamers as they do for students, allowing one to keep toasty while handling a controller, stylus or pencil just as easily as a keyboard and mouse.
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