#duckpond crochet

[alienducky]

Fire Emblem Three Houses Crochet Wyvern - attempt 1

I finally finished it! It's taken me since the end of March 2022 (on and off, I got sidetracked making Alligator Loki for a while) but my prototype wyvern is done

Wyvern is 123.5 inches / 10foot 3.5 inches / 313.69cm wingtip to wingtip, and 56 inches / 4 foot 6 inches / 142.24cm nose to tail tip, and roughly 6 lbs / 2.72 kg ish. So a chunky baby He was made out of aran weight yarn using a 5mm hook and for the most part is Tunisian knit stitch. His toes were done in Tunisian simple stitch, and I think I did his teeth in normal rounds?

And now I do a cut to save everyone's feeds from all the pictures I'm going to share ^_^

(For reference, here are two photos of the wyvern from in game)

First, a few more angles on wyvern, and then I'll point out things I want to change for the next one

He's a handsome lad, and very recognisable for what he's meant to be!

But he also could be improved. A lot

Example 1, I lined up wyverns nose and tail tip against the in game 3d model to see how close he was to being accurate. And, er. yeah.

To give myself credit, when I first started this back in March 2022, I was working out lengths and widths and general sizing from screenshots taken from examining units in Three Houses, where I traced the outline onto a sheet of paper to measure things and perspective makes things AWKWARD, ok? (As is having brain farts and not remembering that the ruler had metric on the other side of it, but shush, let's not mention that bit)

So the biggest thing to fix will be the scaling, if I can. I can definitely make the tail longer, the head shorter and thinner, the chest between the wings thinner, the wing sockets bulkier, and thanking all the stars, the wings get to be smaller too. By a LOT

The other major thing I want to do different/better is how the ridges along his back from nose to tail tip work.

While they do work on wyvern, they don't look as great as I think they potentially can? So I'm going to be doing double layers of crochet, sort of, to help give the sticky up bit of the overlapping ridges more definition, and hopefully make them look like the slightly thicker scaling they're meant to be. It'll also help to smooth them out, so they won't have the weird dips where I've joined one to the next

I'm going to do the wings differently too, because what I did with these ones was quite frankly awful? I cut each wing segment into individual pieces to then hem and flip inside out to over sew the visible edges, and then hemmed up the sides that went inside the struts to then sew the crocheted parts to the fabric. So the fabric was the cheese to the crochet bread in this awful, awful sandwich situation. I am also never, ever buying anything that is even vaguely silky or satiny or slippery ever again for anything

For the next one I'll keep the two pieces of wing fabric as one big piece, since the top and bottom of the wing membranes are actually slightly different colours if you look closely, but I'm going to cheat and use some of that iron on hemming tape stuff to fill the inside of the fabric after I've done all the outer hemming and over sewing so it'll kind of look like all the veins and stuff that the membranes have? So the fabric hopefully won't slip around so much, so will be easier to sew, and keeping it as one big piece means there's less change of me messing up the positioning of the struts on the panels because the wings on this one aren't equal despite my best efforts

Next is Claude's white wyvern, but it'll be made with DK yarn and either a 3.5 or 4mm hook, so it will (hopefully) come out significantly smaller than this one. And that one is going to get plastic boning/skeleton in it, so it'll be poseable!!!

#duckpond stuff #duckpond crochet #crochet wyvern #tunisian crochet #fe3h #fe3h wyvern

[lindoig8]

Monday/Tuesday, 25-26 October

Monday

It was a hot and windy day, mid-30s with a blistering easterly gale blowing all day. We drove the (roughly) 250 kilometres from Leonora, past Day Dawn, through Menzies and Broadarrow, to Kalgoorlie to Boulder where we booked into the South Boulder G’day Discovery Park for a couple of days – subsequently extended to four days. These are all places I recall from my youth, not that I have ever been there, but because Mum and Dad spoke about them and left me with romantic ideas about their remoteness, pioneering and isolation. (I did live in Boulder as a baby!) With all the mining activity right through the whole area, there is not much isolation any longer, but there is still a little romance for me in the ghost-town nature of the places, with abandoned houses, shacks, rusting machinery and desolate mining gear, etc.

Because we were such consistent Discovery Park members and customers, they kindly upgraded us with an en suite – a small private bathroom and toilet adjacent to our parking bay. It was really great because it meant we could shower as often as we liked without having to empty our own tiny bathroom, then dry it out and repack everything back in it once we had showered.

We arrived before lunch so got ourselves set up comfortably and ate our lunch in the van before heading back into town (Kalgoorlie) to visit the Information Centre and do a big grocery replenishment at the supermarket. We got some good information at the Visitors Centre, including that the next big blast at the Big Pit was to be at 5.30 that afternoon. Once we had packed all our groceries away, we drove up to the Big Pit – a mammoth hole in the ground, maybe 500 metres across and 200 metres deep (just guessing, maybe more, but it is enormous!) Alas, we were then advised that the blast had been cancelled due to the extremely high wind that had been pummelling us all day.

We bought fish and chips for dinner at a shop in the delightful little South Boulder shopping strip. It was a lovely quaint, quiet row of shops, some quite eclectic, all adorned with spectacular displays of flowering plants along the narrow roadway. Equal to any of the ‘village green’ places designed to create that image – but this was ‘as is’ in its true historical character. Really delightful.

Tuesday

We stayed around the caravan most of the day, but I went out for 2 or 3 hours from mid-afternoon looking for birds.

I stopped off at the Reservoir Lookout where the (C Y O’Connor) Mundaring Weir to Kalgoorlie pipeline terminated – it has since been extended to service places like Kambalda, and probably numerous other small mining settlements in the region. Great views, but no birds.

I went on to Hammond Park, something of a slightly gauche urban wildlife park with a miniature village, a duckpond, a few aviaries and gardens, but again, I was not impressed with the manicured and artificial nature of the place. But the cemetery was immediately across the road and I wandered around there for half an hour, including in some associated bushland and saw quite a few birds there.

I then went to the much larger Karlkurla Bushland Reserve and strolled around that for quite a while – and even saw a couple of new lifers for me. It was still pretty windy and there was a bit of rain in the air that almost had me running back to the car a couple of times, but it was a nice walk and I was rewarded with some new birds.

I think the night was the coolest we have had for several months and we certainly needed our warm blankets and Heather’s crocheted rug to snuggle into.

[alienducky]

Crochet Alligator is finished!!!!!

He is finished and with cousin in law and I am now trying to remember what I wanted to do with myself in all my new free time XD

More pictures under the cut or various close ups of him

*Disclaimer that this is an alligator pattern made by me. Any resemblance to anyone living dead or fictional is ENTIRELY coincidental (and also bollocks, because I was pretty lax with copying the colouring). No copyright infringement or whatever the terms are is intended. I've made this for a family member and haven't taken any payment for it. It's just an Alligator with a funny little hat*

His teeth match up when his mouth closes =3

His webbed toes took me a while and many attempts to work out, but I'm pretty happy with them. Except the front ones. I know they should be longer but by the time I realised I didn't have the spoons to fix them

The back bumps took forever and have killed my hands, but were very very worth it

#duckpond stuff #duckpond crochet #crochet #tunisian crochet #crochet alligator

[alienducky]

I do actually need to undo wyvern wings 😭

Cut for pictures and rambling

This is wyvern so far. A lot more proportional this time, so was looking good!

And then I got the saddle-less model

I make wyvern starting from the tail, so tail is sections 1-13. You've then got 14-16 over the leg, 17 covers front of leg join and start of wing opening, 18 is super diddy for some reason, and then 19 starts to slope, and 20 finishes off the wing hole

And with mine at the moment

I ran out of wing hole to slope 20 down, because 19 matches up to the wing hole closing and then I've done two rows of body

To be fair to myself, I did do body before I had the model and had vaguely guesstimated what the panels should be

I could hand wave it and say eh, good enough, but I don't want to because I promised myself I wouldn't handwave after the prototype because this is for the Claude plushie!

So I need to undo the wing-arms so I can make wing holes bigger 😣

Because I thought I was being super clever when I did the crochet around the wing holes, and worked it so I was picking up the edges so it kinda looks like it's continuing from the main pieces, and not added on afterwards like first one which went lumpy. Which worked! The join is nice and neat and great! But means I need to undo the whole "arm" to then add more rows before the rejoin and just urgh

Small mercies in that the pattern won't change too much when I then get back to the wings, they'll just be a bit wider in places. Which might help my "hand" situation now I think about it because that needed to be longer to fit all the increases in nicely? Maybe?

#duckpond stuff #duckpond crochet #crochet wyvern #ill get there. eventually #at least im letting myself skip all the body markings i guess. i dont hate myself quite that much

[alienducky]

Omg I just saw your crochet Wyvern and it’s an amazing work of art omg!!!

Do you have any progress updates? 😁

Heh, thank you! I'm sure wyvern would be blushing if I had any pink felt to stick to his cheeks ^_^#

I haven't worked on him in AGES because I was focusing on getting Loki done, since that was a request rather than a me thing, but I have started chipping away at him in the last few days, and I've taken some photos just now I can share!

So this is where I'm up to at the moment. On the first wing I've done all the struts, and now just have both sides of the "arm" to do. I eventually worked out that if I tack the fabric down to one side, it makes things so, so much easier when I then have to match up the stitches to sew the crochet together around it ^^;;; So things are going a tad quicker than the first few struts did!

And speaking of the first few struts, here they are doing the weird twisting thing I'm pretty sure I talked about before? I am very confused why it's doing this, because when I laid the crochet out by itself it didn't twist at all? >__<

And then here's a few pictures of him, showing off his different bits I'm going to fix the nose on the next one, so it doesn't dip in and flare out again

The head and back ridges refuse to lay flat, but again, I'm going to try something different on the next one, similar to what I learned to do when making Loki's webbed toes. I'm also going to update the neck sections so it matches the naked wyvern we got to see in Three Hopes rather than what I guessed (which was kinda close. Kinda)

Also going to tweak these tail ridges, because as much as I love them, the center points don't really stay pointy, and keep trying to curl over themselves. They're cool as heck for a first attempt, but yeah. Could be better

#I got an ask! #duckpond stuff #duckpond crochet #crochet wyvern

[alienducky]

Trying to get a picture of him all spread out is damn near impossible because I

1) can't clear enough floor space for his 123.5 inch wing span to lay flat

2) can't get my phone high enough above the bed (on which the very tippy tips of his wing tips still poke off the edge) while I'm standing on it with my hands up near the ceiling to fit him all in. Seriously, so many photos where I was blindly tapping for the button and I still cut off chunks of his wings

He is a big boy!

123.5" wingtip to wingtip, 56" nose to tail tip. Which is 10' 3.5" and 4' 6"s respectfully, and then 313.69cm and 142.24cm

And he weighs about 6lbs? Ish? I think my scales are broken. (2.72kg)

I've taken more photos showing various bits of him but I want to edit/compare them to shots of the in game model, so I'll do another post later when I've found the spoons to do that

#duckpond stuff #duckpond crochet #crochet wyvern

[alienducky]

Finished Teef!!!!!

They more or less match up when the mouth is closed, so I'm happy with them!

Now all I've got to do is sew up the back, stuffing as I go, then make his hat, and give him back ridges

And hope my cousin-in-law doesn't mind he looks nothing like Loki, eheh <___<;;;

#duckpond stuff #duckpond crochet #crochet alligator #crochet #tunisian crochet

[alienducky]

@wherefore-whinnies Just wanted to show you what else can be done with filet crochet. This was a cross stitch pattern someone gave me (that I've lost the pattern for or I'd share it) that for some reason I decided would be easier to crochet?

As you can see, doesn't really work too well with darker yarn ^^;;; It's the mirror of the white side, but you can barely see it

(as always, please excuse the background mess >__<;;)

#duckpond stuff #crochet #filet crochet #duckpond crochet

[alienducky]

Second wyvern is going well. I'm not entirely happy with the leg join, but I've reached the "fuckit it'll do" stage. Maybe if I do decide to turn this into a pattern to share and end up making a third wyvern I can work it out then, but for now I can live with it. Especially since it won't look quite so bad when stuffed and stretched out.

Next is working out how big to make the belly so that the belly-neck join ends up 60 stitches round, the same as the tail ended, and also work out how big to make the wing holes, because I still don't have a nekkid wyvern model and working it out from the saddled wyvern blender file and screenshots of the nekkid one from Hopes is all sorts of awkward

I want the wing joins to be chunkier on this one, because they are kind of flimsy on the first. (The wings also get to be shorter on this one because I can get more accurate measurements, thank everything, which will also help with the flimsy, but yeah, chunkier join will help more)

#duckpond stuff #crochet wyvern #duckpond crochet

[alienducky]

Wyvern body from tail tip to chest-neck join is officially done!

I'm pretty happy with how the "normally hidden by the saddle" bits turned out 😊

3D model for comparison

And that's where I'm up to. So four hopefully easy neck panels, and then the nightmare that will be the head

Nightmare because I really really like what I did for the first one but this one needs to be 20 rows shorter and I don't know how many stitches thinner so getting all the little details I snuck in last time in there is going to hurt

#duckpond stuff #crochet wyvern #duckpond crochet

[alienducky]

Teef!

I'll get there. Eventually. Hopefully before next weekend

#duckpond stuff #crochet alligator #duckpond crochet

[alienducky]

He's so frikken dorky looking, and too big to put anywhere 😅

I'll get proper photos tomorrow once I've cleared enough space for him to stretch his wings out so I can show his measurements. I might have to lay him out diagonally across my bed... Hmmm

I'm also going to try and get shots from the blender file I have from the 3House wyvern to compare certain bits to what I've done (if I can't find files for the naked one from 3Hopes that shows what's under the saddle) because I've got a list of things I want to improve on, and it's easier to explain with pictures

...

I can't wait till I do do the next one and put plastic boning in it so I can close the mouth so it isn't screaming all the time

#duckpond stuff #crochet wyvern #duckpond crochet

[alienducky]

I made him a hat =3

Ok! I've got this. Just a few loose threads to tie off and sew in, and a couple more rows of back spikes

Which are going to be single and half treble crochet worked into the visible Tunisian stitches, and not chains I've then got to sew on, thank you very much. Learned that lesson already

#duckpond stuff #duckpond crochet #crochet alligator

[alienducky]

The great thing about prototypes is you can at points say "fuck it, that's close enough" and call things done so you can move on to the next bit

The downside to doing that is you reach the same point on the "proper" version and still have no clue how to make it work

Gotta somehow turn this

Into this

And so far I've got...

Yeah

The inside part of the legs will join the belly where the red bobble stitch markers are, so the "butt" won't be too big, but I'm just... stuck on how to make it look like that screenshot, and also make it look pretty?

The random patch of maybe-belly overlapping the side of the last tail segment is driving me a little bonkers tbh

#duckpond stuff #crochet wyvern #duckpond crochet

[alienducky]

So the second tail attempt is going well... 👀💧

I started doing the tail segments thinking "well they've got to be longer anyway, so I'll just vaguely base them off what i did first time", got to seven out of thirteen and realised that yeah, I'd fucked up my numbers somewhere and it was going to be massive

So I undid it all back to three so I wouldn't waste yarn and just added extra rows to the first pattern but I'm now left with all this extra yarn hanging around that I can't do anything with, because I can't sew up till I'm ready to put the plastic skeleton and stuffing in, which I can't do till everything is finished so I know how much skeleton I need to buy

(I only have a foot each of the three sizes I'm going to use atm, to see how chunky and bendable they were)

On the one hand, I imagine things will be easier if I crochet everything before stuffing and sewing it, because I remember things being awkward with the first one. But on the other hand, the yarn tails are going to drive me insane and I like sewing as I go so I don't have to do it all at once

😮‍💨

#duckpond stuff #crochet wyvern #duckpond crochet

[alienducky]

Every other piece of this alligator has ended up way bigger or longer than the numbers said they would

So why the fuck didn't the snout do the same?!?!?!?

I was all excited I could maybe get started on the back lumps, but nope. Gotta redo the damn thing. Rarr

#duckpond stuff #duckpond crochet #crochet ramblings #crochet alligator #nearly done. i hope. i very very much hope