Ch'tite Geekette: Miscellaneous

Bendy Warhol, or a Reddit Arbitrary Day Exchange Story.

This is a post about my reddit exchange story, I haven't included the pattern but if you're interested in it, let me know! Edit: Pattern is now at the bottom.

For those of you who frequent reddit, you might know that these exchanges are made throughout the year, whereby users subscribe to an exchange, and get matched to another user randomly to get them a gift, and receive a gift from another user. (I just made this explanation more complicated than it is... haven't I?)

I've been participating in these exchanges for a few years now, mostly for the Secret Santa ones, the Teacher Appreciation ones, and now these mid-year exchange called Arbitrary Day. Other exchanges can be very specific: Harry Potter, Socks, Dinosaurs, Dr. Who, Snacks, Pets... you name it, reddit has it!

This past May, I signed up for the 2016 Arbitrary Day. The person I was matched with had good info on her form that I was able to use. She likes Archer, Rick and Morty, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Futurama... and was ok with an handmade gift.

Handmade gift? Of course I'm in!

I knew I wanted to make a pillow in tunisian crochet, since the last project I made used this technique and I loved working on it. (I'll write a blog post about this pillow too, just haven't had the chance to work on it yet).

There was a lot of different designs I could have gone for. I thought about taking a character from each of her favorite show and include them all. But nothing I was sketching up really stroke me as good, so I decided to focus on one show. At first I thought about Game of Thrones, since I also love this show. However, with all the different houses I wasn't sure which ones she was rooting for. Also, there are so many GoT handmade items that I decided to opt for a different show.

FUTURAMA! I CHOOSE YOU!
I've never watched this show, shame on me! But knowing it's a fun and somewhat little offensive show, it was a perfect choice. I wanted to put a twist on it, and since my giftee mentioned a fabric she liked with Ziggy Stardust Bulldog, I went for a take on colorful art + bender.

It took me about an hour for each square, but the longest was securing and weaving in the tails, and doing the black outline. The quote side worked up fairly fast tho!

Here are a few pictures of the process:

Showing off the weaving ends process...

Before the black outline.

With the black outline, checking which one looked the best.

This was more than 5600 stitches, and it took me about 20 hours. I liked how it looked when I finished and I sure hope my giftee will like it too :)

Now onto more experimentation!

Pattern

I've never written a pattern for the Tunisian crochet technique, please let me know if this is not easily readable and I'll try to make it better.

This assumes that you know about the Tunisian crochet basic stitch, as well as being comfortable with color changing in Tunisian crochet.
In this project, I didn't always carry over the yarn. If there was more than 5 or 6 stitches apart, I would use a different skein.

Use any color of yarn you like.

The patterns go from bottom to top of the work. Each row is the pass forward and back, which means it's worked from right to left.

Bender

Here I'll use the shortcuts B (for background color), H (for head color), and A (for antenna color). Eyes and mouth are always white, so I'll use W, and the pupils are black which will be BL.

Chain 25
Row 1: 7B, 11H, 7B
Rows 2-4: 7B, 9W, 2H, 7B
Rows 5-6: 7B, 11H, 7B
Row 7: 6B, 8W, 4H, 7B
Row 8: 6B, 3W, 1B, 3W, 1B, 4H, 7B
Row 9: 6B, 8W, 4H, 7B
Rows 10-12: 7B, 11H, 7B
Row 13: 8B, 9H, 8B
Row 14: 9B, 7H, 9B
Row 15: 11B, 3A, 11B
Rows 16-17: 12B, 1H, 12B
Row 18: 12B, 1A, 12B

Quote

For the quote side, I'll use B for background and W for words. I made it looking at my Excel graph, this is the transcription of it, it's a lot of back&forth color change.

Chain 75
Rows 1-4: 75B
Row 5: 12B, 5W, 1B, 5W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 5B, 5W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 3B, 5W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 12B
Rows 6-8: 12B, 1W, 5B, 1W, 5B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 9B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 7B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 12B
Row 9: 12B, 5W, 1B, 5W, 1B, 5W, 9B, 1W, 1B, 5W, 3B, 1W, 4B, 4W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 12B
Row 10: 16B, 1W, 5B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 9B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 7B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 12B
Row 11: 16B, 1W, 5B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 9B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 7B, 1W, 1B, 2W, 1B, 2W, 12B
Row 12: 12B, 5W, 1B, 5W, 1B, 5W, 9B, 1W, 1B, 5W, 1B, 5W, 1B, 5W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 12B
Rows 13-14: 75B
Row 15: 27B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 1B, 5W, 25B
Rows 16-17: 27B, 1W, 3B, 2W, 2B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 29B
Row 18: 27B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 29B
Row 19: 25B, 5W, 1B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 1B, 5W, 1B, 5W, 25B
Rows 20-21: 25B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 2B, 2W, 1B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 5B, 1W, 25B
Row 22: 25B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 1B, 5W, 25B
Rows 23-24: 75B
Row 25: 22B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 5B, 5W, 3B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 2B, 4W, 22B
Rows 26-28: 22B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 9B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 22B
Row 29: 20B, 5W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 6B, 4W, 3B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 2B, 4W, 20B
Row 30: 20B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 9B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 20B
Row 31: 20B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 1B, 2W, 1B, 2W, 9B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 20B
Row 32: 20B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 1B, 1W, 3B, 1W, 5B, 5W, 1B, 5W, 1B, 1W, 2B, 4W, 20B
Rows 33-36: 75B

Assembly

I sewed all the squares together, then attach both side with a crab stitch.

My Bender squares were 6"x6", I gauge first how many stitches I needed to get to this dimension, which gave me 25 stitches wide for 18 stitches high.
The reason is that I had purchased a 12"x18" pillow to use inside. However, if your dimensions are a little off, simply use stuffing inside.

This year is the first year where I won't be spending the holiday festivities with my family in France. With my husband, we unfortunately didn't feel brave enough to go for an 11 hours flight trip with our toddler-terrors. We'll be spending our holiday break in sunny south California where the snow and the cold don't exist.

Seeing all of the lights and decorations everywhere made me realize that this year, it would be nice to have my own "sapin", as it's called in France.

After having hesitated on the shape: should I do little cones that fit into each other to give the idea of branches? should I use a stitch pattern that will give some texture? should I do an already decorated tree by alternating colors and textures?... I went with a simple cone so that I could decorate it the way I want, and change the ornaments from a year to another. Using a really bulky yarn allowed for a textured finish while using single crochet.

Here is a close up:

I bought 2 skeins of Bernat Blanket, below you can see the size of the tree after using 1 skein:

Close up on how the bead are attached within the chain and to the tree:

The cone was made by an increase of 3 stitches every other row, till reaching 102.
Then I made a flat circle to close it up at the bottom.

Since the filling was going to stretch the bottom and not leave it flat, I cut a circle in some cardboard box I had and inserted it inside.

Notes

* Stuffing something this big was difficult, I didn't manage to make it look nice and even everywhere.
* Making sure the chains spiral in a nice way all around would have been easier if I pinned them down first instead of freestyling.
* Finishing projects in the late evening means lots of little mistakes (beige beads in place of some white, uneven spirals...), let's just pretend everything was part of the design!

Numbers!

I was curious to know how many stitches this tree totaled:
* magic ring with 6 single crochet and increasing by 3 every other row till row 65 = 3558 stitches
* flat circle from magic ring with 7 single crochet and increasing by 7 every row till row 14 = 735 stitches

4293 stitches in total for this stuffed tree, which is as tall as my little ones.