Oops, it's been a long time since I updated here again! In the meantime, I've gotten really into crochet and wanted to show off (and yap :3) about a few things I've just finished up.

I wanted to make some little doll house rugs and I've always thought the rugs from Pokemon RSE were adorable, so I wanted to try my hand at that! Also, I don't actually have a doll house, but I do have some miniature kits I've been meaning to do... Meanwhile, these might be able to work as coasters or just decorations? IDK. I'm sure they'll find somewhere to live, eventually...

The first one I tried was the spikes mat, mostly because it seemed the most straight forward. I found an equation on Reddit to plan out the stitch numbers and increases per row, and just kinda went for it. I did a prototype before this and figured out that putting a single row of a color change isn't that pretty, so I did some surface crochet instead (same for the X's and Y's).

...the only issue is: I kinda didn't fully understand how crochet shaping works. I've mostly been making amigurumi (read: rounded shapes), so I just by default started with a magic ring of six, but, actually, to make a properly flat shape, you need to start with a magic ring of eight. So, in other words, I ended up with a lovely little bowl, rather than a rug. orz
It does fit surprisingly nicely in a wooden bowl I bought a while back, though! (And it makes it so I don't have to weave in the ends, at least. ^^")

With that lesson learned, I started a new rug-thing, the attract mat! The same equation from earlier works, you just multiply everything by 8 rather than six, so that's locked down pretty easily. But this design was quite a bit more complex; I simplified the original quite a bit, but I still probably should've gone further, oops. A comparison between the plan and final result:In the long run, I do really like this color scheme; I think it would work really well for making, like, a coleus in the future or something! And I found the color changes to be surprisingly fun and somehow more easy to keep track of than just a flat color (even if it's kinda crazy having three working yarns at once! so much untangling...). I'm not sure how well the design actually translated, though? Inherently in tapestry crochet, you end up with a bunch of colors going in strange places.... Also, working in the round makes it so the rows didn't quite line up -- I probably should've done invisible joins, instead. In fact, frankly, I think the most "accurate" solution here would be to just cross stitch the original pixel art on plastic canvas, but whatever. This was a fun experiment nevertheless!

I have a page on my site for other little crochet fellas I've made, but the one I'm most proud of (so far, at least ^^) is this Mimikyu:

Honestly, I think my favorite thing about crochet is playing around with shapes; like with this little girlie, I realized that her "ears" could be made into "legs" to go with a Madoka-esque puffy dress. I really should make a Madoka one of these days! (And a Charlotte would be very cute, as well....)

....There's a lot more I could say about my life and the world, obviously, but I just don't have the mental or physical bandwidth for that at the moment, so I'm just gonna sign off here. Thanks for reading and wish you luck with whatever you might be working on! ^^