Homer and Marge Simpson beanies and accessories

I am a fanatic when it comes to The Simpsons and so when we decided to take The Kidlet to Universal Studios for a surprise birthday trip, I knew this would be the perfect time to create an homage. At Universal Studios, there is a Simpsons ride and an entire Springfield built around it. Plus you get to meet the characters!

I started first with the Homer beanie. The construction was pretty straight-forward. It's just an average beanie, all in yellow. When it was complete, I needed to add Homer's trademark hair. For the top hairs, I simply chained a long row in black and did a single stitch across, as tight as I could. This made it stand up easily (in fact, it almost manipulates like a pipe cleaner). For the back of his head, I opted for a zig-zag stitch in a single row made of double crochet stitches. This gave it the perfect height and line weight to resemble his hair.

But what is any outfit without accessories? So I decided to make an accompanying scarf out of donuts. Mmm.... donuts! At first, I'd planned to make a full dozen, but changed my mind halfway through to include Homer's muzzle instead. Since the donuts can't easily be tied around your neck to keep you warm, the muzzle piece keeps your neck warm AND it can be used to cover the face if its actually cold.

The large safety pin that you see in the picture above is actually a skirt/kilt pin that I had. I used it to clip the donuts together when worn as a straight scarf - that way they don't blow around or turn upside down.

I did take good notes as I was making the muzzle and scarf - I will post a pattern soon!

The Marge beanie was a no-brainer. I'd recently made my first beanie using the bobble stitch and I knew right away that's what I'd use for Marge. I used the pattern found here and then added four rows to the back part of the beanie, which gives it a bit of a "mullet" look.

For Marge's necklace, I decided that a crochet piece would match best so I simply made red circles and sewed them all together. They started curling into themselves by the end of the day which gives them more of a spherical appearance, but they're actually flat circles.

I was pretty happy with the way everything turned out but it was so exciting when the people who work at the Springfield section of the park would compliment us. And when Marge and Homer came out for a photo op, they insisted on kissing and hugging us -- and Homer tried to take a bite out of the donuts!

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Interested in owning a piece like this? Check out my shop or email me for a custom order! . : * ~ * : . _ . : * ~ * : . _ . : * ~ * : .

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crochet beanie, scarf, and mittens!

It's been a REALLY long time since I've posted anything here. Not that I haven't been crafting, I just haven't been posting.

Anyway, I had some spare time over the holidays (vacation time plus I was sick) so I spent a lot of it on the couch with my crochet hook. I am still very much an amateur crochet-ist but I am getting better at reading patterns so I thought I'd give a few things a whirl.

The first thing that I did was make a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beanie and mask for Ryan. The free pattern that I used (found here) is sized for a child but in the comments it suggests increasing a hook size for an adult. That was exactly what I did - the men in Ryan's family are famous for having Big Giant Heads so I used an "I" hook and I believe I added one extra row of green before switching to the mask color.

This came together pretty quickly, even for someone like me who doesn't work very fast. If you're an accomplished crochet master you could probably whip this out in a couple of hours. It probably took me about 4-5 hours, including some breaks, so not too bad!

I liked the result so much that I immediately got to work making one for my nephew, The Kidlet, and used the recommended pattern size from the blog and it fit 100% perfectly. He wanted a red mask and Ryan wanted a purple, so that's what they got.

Me? I'm not a huge TMNT fan and I don't wear a lot of beanies, truthfully. So rather than make another beanie, I opted to make a scarf. I figured that way we'd thematically match but I didn't have to be overheated in a hat. So I adjusted the mask to fit on a scarf and voila! I made one mask in each color and then the rest of the scarf in 'turtle green'. The best part is that where the green attaches to the mask it's not perfectly flat so it bows out a tiny bit, which actually makes it resemble the roundedness of their faces!

I didn't really write a pattern for this because I just made it up along as I went, but if anyone is interested I'm happy to post it here!

I also decided to go for broke and try and design some TMNT mittens to go with the beanie. I adapted an existing mitten pattern for the thumb and palm section and when I got to the finger area, I split the stitches in half (turtles have only two giant 'fingers'). To be honest, these were mostly ad-libbed and took a LOT of trial and error (mostly error) to get them into a general shape. These took me forever and so I only made one set. Do they match? Absolutely not! If you know what you're looking for, you can see that the seams spiral all over the place and the stitch counts are totally uneven. I tried dressing them up with colored cuffs but they still look pretty dull. Ryan says that they're cool and that he'll wear them; lucky for him he'll never have to prove it! It is rarely cold enough around here for gloves! :)







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Interested in owning a piece like this? Check out my shop or email me for a custom order! . : * ~ * : . _ . : * ~ * : . _ . : * ~ * : .