TMBG Finger Puppets

TMBG Finger Puppets

A little something special from me this week. I’m going to see They Might Be Giants in concert in a few weeks time and I’m pretty excited. Since They came out last, eleven years ago, I’ve had three kids, who are big fans just like their mother. Meaning the three kids dvds (Here Come the ABCsHere Come the 123s, and Here Comes Science) get a lot of air time in our household.

In the first two dvds, John and John appear to introduce the song segments in the guise of puppets. Large puppets. But it seemed to me, these would make great tiny puppets too. Tiny finger puppets. So I made some. And because I’m so generous, I wrote down the pattern, to share here, exclusively, so you can have your own tiny Johns too! Keep reading after the jump for the pattern!

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You Can’t Take The Yarn From Us!!

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The evil shadow of Fox has fallen again upon the verse. First they took our show. Now they want our yarn.

In the spirit of things, I’ve decided to share one of my favorite ’Cunning Cap’ inspired crafts… the Cunning Cozy! This cunning little cozy is the perfect place to store (or hide) your lip balm no matter where in the verse you are.

“Not a fan of lip balm? The hat can also be used as a pencil topper or ornament.” ~ Kristin Stevenson

The creator  of the Jayne Hat Lip Balm Cozy is Kristin Stevenson of Tiny Purrs. You may recognize her as the creator of the Ewok scoodie shared on this site earlier in the year.

Tutorial: Needle Felted Solar System Mobile

Needle Felted Solar System

I’ve never actually tried needle felting myself, but this is such a wonderful use of the craft that I am definitely going to give it a go sometime. Check out this Needle Felted Solar System Mobile over on It’s a Knit House.

There’s a set of instructions for making your own Needle Felted Solar System Mobile. Although obviously, it’s not quite to scale. If you made a 2 inch diammeter version of the Earth in a scale model, the Sun would have to be 18 feet across, and you’d need 22 miles to fit the whole thing in, including orbits (or 29 miles if you want to include Pluto).

But for illustrative purposes this is an awesome geeky science craft! I want one.

Glass Beadwork Beads: Pokeball and Pac-man’s Inky

Last week Make: Craft featured a post on glass beadwork on wooden beads. As a bit of a dabbler in bead-weaving myself I was keen to have a go, and soon found myself wondering how to apply the technique to something geeky, as you do. What do you reckon to my Pokeball bead and Inky from Pac-man?

Glasswork beaded beads - Pac-man Ghost and Pokeball

It took some trial and error, and they aren’t the quickest of things to make, but enjoyable nonetheless. If you want to give it a go you’ll need lots of tiny seed beads (I used 3 mm), some tough beading thread and something to bead around. The tutorial uses wooden beads, but I used polystyrene balls from a craft store, so they are actually pretty lightweight.

The full beaded beads how-to can be found here. The tutorial is in Czech, but the images are easy to follow and you can see the Google Translate version of the page here.

If anyone has any suggestions for other spherical geeky things that could be beaded like this, post below!

Sherlock morse code bracelets

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These Sherlock morse code bracelets are fantastic!! I love them! Final Problem on Tumblr made them, and gives instructions! There’s also a link to a morse code translator to make other sayings! I can’t wait to try this out!! This quote is from the episode ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’ (S2E2) and is one of my favourite moments between Sherlock and John!

Star Wars Boba Fett Lamp

boba-lampSo you’ve got your R2-D2 bra all made, but you’re still needing to make something else Star Wars related…what to make, what to make? If you’re feeling  like a simple craft and you’ve got a few things to upcycle, then the Boba Fett lamp might be right up your alley.

Major League Mods has posted a fairly simple tutorial over at Instructables on how to take a simple lamp base and a Boba Fett helmet and turn them into a new lamp. The nice thing about this tutorial, that while it uses a Boba Fett helmet, you could use any toy helmet: Darth Vader, any kind of trooper, maybe even an Iron Man helmet.