How to make a plush Space Core (from Portal 2)

Ba ba ba. Bababa. Space. Ba.

Materials:

Light grey, black, and yellowish-orange fleece

Medium to dark grey sheet-type fabric

This pattern. (Which belongs to the folks at www.silverseam.com. I'm not making money off of this.)

A sewing needle

White and black thread, grey if you can find it

Fluff

Optional Materials:

A sound-chip-thing *

How to actually make it

Start by printing out the pattern above so it fills the entire length of a sheet of US letter paper. Cut it out, and then trace it seven times onto the light grey fabric. Make sure to leave slightly more than half an inch in between the shapes on the fabric so you can cut them out with a bit of room to spare. 

Now sew the pieces together on the lines you traced, except for half of one side on the last one. You will have an inside-out sphere with a slit down one side. Turn it the correct way out. Put the fluff in it until it feels like you want it. (This would be the correct time to put the sound chip in. Just remember where you put it so you can find it later. Draw a dot on thefabric or something.) Now that it has insides inside of it, sew up the rest of the slit. Fold the edges under when you sew it so they don't stick out, and so your sphere doesn't have a bulge there.

Cut out two black fleece circles whatever size looks right and sew them over the holes where all of the circle parts intersect. They will be very close to the size of the yellow circle you cut out later.

Cut a rectangle out of the darker grey fabric. This will go behind the eye-piece. Make it a bit bigger than you want it to be, because you will be folding the corners and edges under so they don't fray. Once you've cut it out, fold the edges under as you sew so it's roughly this shape:

Take your yellowish orange fabric and cut a circle that will fit in your rounded rectangle. That will be the "eye". Before you sew that on, though, you need a black circle of the same size. Once you have the black circle, you will cut chunks out of it so it takes on an asterisk shape. Something like this:

You could either sew each... tine? (Branch? Arm? Protrusion?) on to the yellow circle, two at a time, or glue the asterisk on. I sewed it on because I only had the kind of glue that comes on a stick, and it just seemed more professional to sew it. I'm sure either way would work; just put it on there somehow. Then, sew the eye bit on in the middle of the rounded rectangle.

This next part, the handles, is a pain in the ass. Just letting you know. If you've been waiting for a place to stop, maybe go do whatever it is you do while not destroying the facility eat dinner, or sleep, or just take a break, this is the time.


Okay, you're back. The handles. Cut a strip of the darker grey fabric, about fifteen to sixteen inches (I think that's about 40 or 50 centimeters) long and a little less than six inches (15 cm) wide. Hold it up where it will be and see what looks right.

Fold it into thirds, then fold the two edges in towards the center. Fold that in half and sew along where those two edges meet. Once you're satisfied with how that looks, decide exactly where you want the bends to be. Make a note of it, draw a dot there or something, and then sew the insides of the corners together.

Then line up the handle a whatever angle you would like it to be at, probably slightly angled forwards. Sew the two sides firmly onto the black circles on the sides. (I do realize that they should be attached closer to the outside of the sphere, but this was sturdier.)

Repeat those steps for the other handle. When they're both attached, cut two sqaures of the black fleece, each about three and a half inches wide (Those using the metric system, just cut them into a size that looks right). Roll one around the middle of each handle and sew them so they won't unroll.

And you have a space core! Congratulations. It may have a few creative liberties taken with it, and is nowhere near as cool as this Wheatley puppet someone made, but you know. Still pretty cool


*The best place to find one would be Build-a-Bear. They sell them separately from the bears for eight dollars. The audio quality will, of course, be horrible. Unless you can impersonate the space core really well, you'll be stuck recording off of your computer. (Here is a website with mp3s of pretty much everything the core says.)

If you're so inclined and have the circuit board and wires and a speaker and all of that, you could make your own. I don't really know how to do that, and have none of those things, but if you do, it would just turn out that much better.

I made a Beartato stuffed animal, and now you can do it too.

My new Beartato stuffed animal

in which a picture is shown and a brief abstract is given.

The other day I was looking for something fun to do. I also wanted a plush beartato. Realizing that I could at least maim and injure horribly, if not kill, that bird with one stone, I made a plush beartato.

If you don't know what a beartato is, I really have no clue what you're doing making one, but you can find him and the rest of Nedroid's comics here.

You can see the one I made in the picture up top, in which he looks "very smooshy."


How to make your own
in which we discuss the making of a plush beartato.


You will need: 

• Some dark brown (think potato colored) fabric. I used an old T-shirt that I didn't care about any more.

• Some light brown or tan fabric. If you have old khakis you don't mind being destroyed or made into shorts, use those.

• Some black fabric. This is for the eyes, nose, arms, and legs,

• A needle and thread. This should really be self explanatory.

• Black embroidery floss, a sharpie, or yarn. For his mouth. If you want to get fancy, use a white T-shirt for his teeth.

• Fluff. You can buy it at a craft store, of just raid your Q-tips. The latter gets expensive and takes awhile, but it gives your stuffed animals that authentic "cotton that may have been in someone's ear" smell.

• Scissors.

• This pattern

Procedure:

Print out the pattern.

Take the big piece of the pattern and trace it onto the T-shirt or fabric. Cut it out about half an inch away from the lines. Repeat this for the other side.

Line the pieces up and sew almost all the way around them. Leave about 3 inches un-sewn between where you begin sewing and where you stop, because you need a place to put the fluff in.

Turn the Beartato husk inside out. If you've done everything correctly so far, the seam will be on the inside andyou'll be holding something that doesn't look much like a bear or a potato. That's okay, it's supposed to look like that.

Put the fluff in until your Beartato feels the correct amount of smooshy. Then sew the hole closed to keep the fluff in. (I used a whip stitch with the two edges folded in, which is a lot less compex than it sounds and you probably know how to do it already. Here's a tutorial if you aren't sure.) Congratulations, you have a Beartato torso.

Now you'll need to put the face and limbs on. This is the part where it stops looking like just a blob.

I started with the ears, but it's not really important. To make them, I used the thicker collar part of the shirt (it was a turtleneck.) I cut two "D" shaped pieces and folded them in a crinkly fashion. You don't have to crinkle them, you could just sew the bottom part of the ear along the seam that already exists and it would look fine.

Then I put the eyes on. Trace the two little circles onto the black fabric (chalk will show up). Cut them out and sew them on with some black thread.

Now you need to make the snout. Use khaki if you have some, but if you don't use some kind of tan fabric. I used the back of some really tacky tiger-print fabric I got as a gift. Trace the pattern onto the fabric, and sew it on with some fluff between it and the torso.

You should put the nose on now, which is just a folded piece of the black fabric. I folded it in half a couple of times and made sure to have the loose edges tucked under the smooth part. Sew that on with some black thread.

For the mouth, I used embroidery floss to stitch across the front of his face once, and then drew over it in permanent marker a few times so it would look less like a voodoo doll. Again, if you want to, you can use a white t-shirt to make his teeth and then add those, but I was feeling a bit lazy and didn't do that.

For the legs, I used some old brown corduroys. Black would probably look as good or nicer. Trace the pattern onto the fabric of your choice and cut it out. You'll want to roll the limbs into tubes, and then sew up the side of those. Roll up each finger and sew those too. For the legs, I bent them in at a ninety degree angle about half an inch (a centimeter or so) from the end. Sew that in place.

Now sew the unadulterated ends to Beartato's torso and you're finished.

Congratulations!

Edit: If you want a bigger, softer, and more fluffy Beartato you can buy one now. 

How I Wasted a Weekend (And How You Can Do It Too!)

How To Make a Weighted Companion Cube

I made a real life weighted companion cube. Out of cardboard. It took two days of cutting and accidentally burning myself with a glue gun, but I did it. I showed my friend Tom and all he said was that it should be a foot bigger and it is the wrong color. 

As I was making this, I should have taken step by step pictures and remembered exactly what I did, but I wasn't really thinking straight.

You need to get 4-5 hours of your favorite music and a ton of cardboard and hot glue. I don't know exactly how much, I just had a lot of boxes with fairly big sides. And get a lot of hot glue. Like, maybe 20-30 sticks. And last, but not least, a piece of pink construction paper. 

1. Measure (and cut out) 6 squares of cardboard that are 10 inches by 10 inches.

2. Using the hot glue, glue them into a cube shape. If you have to tape the first few together in order to glue, tape on what will be the inside of the cube.

3. Now for the corners. You need to make 8 corner pieces. Believe me, that is a lot. They are made up of 4 different parts each. If you really want to, you can do the math. I thought it was too depressing.

4. The pieces look like this:

The white lines are where you score and fold. The smaller pieces fit in to the corners if the larger pieces. If you see the pieces in front of you and look at the very first picture, it should make sense.
5. A few hours later, after you have made 8 of those, you glue them on to the cube. You should probably put glue on one edge, stick it on, and then glue the other edges.
6. The easiest part of the cube is the pieces on the edges. Just cut out 12 rectangles (3 by about 1.25 inches), fold them in half, and glue them on to the cube.
7. You can paint the cube basically however you want. Use spray paint, acrylic paint, any kind of paint. Hell, you can even leave the cardboard like it is. This step is just to make it look good.
8. Now, cut out 6 hearts out of the pink paper. Try to make them roughly 3 by 3 inches. If you want to make a weighted storage cube instead, you can print out an aperture science logo.
9. When the paint is dry, glue the hearts on to the cube. You can go into more detail with the stripes, different colors, etc., but now, you have a weighted cube of some sort. It will not threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak.


If you make one of these, post pictures of it in the comments or something.


*EDIT*


I had some time, so I finished up the paint and it looks a bit better. I replaced the picture at the top with the new one. This is the original: