bad-mushroom

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The final episode to my analysis of Casshern Sins. In the finale, I explain how a series of structural issues leave Casshern a muddled mess of ambition and style that never comes to fruition.

As always, I’m curious to know your thoughts as well, so feel free to leave a comment.

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Part five of my Casshern Sins analysis. In this episode, I explore the character development, or lack thereof, for the leads, and examine how the narrative suffered as a result.

As always, feel free to share your own thoughts and insights.

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The fourth episode in my six-part analysis series on Casshern Sins.

Arguably the weakest part of this show for me was the world building. The blatant plot holes and lack of congruous details was utterly immersion breaking.

As always, I’m curious to know your thoughts, so feel free to comment!

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Third in my six-part analysis series on Casshern Sins. The art in this series falls short in a few ways, but it’s still fairly distinct.

As always, curious about other opinions, so feel free to leave a comment!

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Continuation of my critical analysis of Casshern Sins. Part 2 of 6. In this episode, I tackle the fundamental flaws in the overall narrative.

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The start of my more recent analytical series on Casshern Sins.

I was disappointed overall, but I’m always curious about other people’s opinions, so let me know what you think.

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SPOILER ALERT! Do not click this if you haven’t watched up to Season 5 Episode 11!

Disclaimer: This is an unofficial, fan-made Once Upon A Time connections chart. I do not, in any way, own the characters or their likenesses. I am not affiliated with ABC or Disney. ABC and Disney own all the rights to Once Upon A Time. This is just a fan creation.

Full size viewable at bad-mushroom.com

My Mom and I have very different tastes in television. She likes watching Hallmark movies and home renovation shows, while I almost exclusively watch things that are violent and have an element of the fantastic to it. With only one TV set in the house, she usually gets to watch her shows when they come on, and I’ll watch mine On Demand or on Hulu a few days later. However, there is one show that has the magical power to bring us together, and that’s ABC’s Once Upon a Time. It’s got the ooey gooey stuff Mom looks for, and the fighting I like too.

Unfortunately, though, my Mom gets pretty confused by the storyline. Understandably so. OUAT is not the most straightforward show. It’s essentially a soap opera with fairy tale characters, way better actors, special effects, and drool-worthy costumes. So a lot of the time I’ve got to stop and answer questions like, “Who’s that?”, “Wasn’t he dead?”, and “Where is this person?”. So, to help her navigate the complicated and tangled relationship landscape of The Enchanted Forest/Storybrooke in time to celebrate the 100th episode, I’ve created a handy dandy chart.

Just a few things to note. The lines reflect either current relationship statuses as of mid-Season 5 if both parties are alive, or the status at time of death of one or both parties. For example, King Leopold is listed as both “married” to Queen Eva and “re-married” to Regina because technically he was still married to Eva when she died, and still married to Regina when he died.

I know a lot of you will look at this and probably think things like, “But Mulan met Belle first!” or “The Blue Fairy helped pretty much everyone!”. I realized that, but for the sake of simplicity, I had to omit a connection or two. I’ve found that too many overlapping lines created confusion, so I tried to keep them to a minimum.

Also, I know that we have information on several characters’ families that were omitted from the chart. For example, we know Rapunzel had a brother who died, and her parents were king and queen of their kingdom. And we all know that Cinderella had a stepmom and two stepsisters. But if both parents’ names are unknown, I left them out. It was also to save space. (Seriously, this file was starting to get out of hand. Full size, this puppy was 2GB and let me tell you, Photoshop was not happy about it.) But if information on them ever surfaces, I’ll be sure to update the chart.

A special thanks goes out to the people who run and contribute to the Once Upon a Time and ABC Once Upon a Time wikias. I never could have compiled all of this if it weren’t for your dedication to providing accurate summaries and beautiful screencaps and promo images. Thank you thank you thank you!

I hope this helps anyone else who may have been overwhelmed by the complexity of the show!

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Castle s07e23

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Spending my rainy Sunday evening drinking my #adagioteas 10th Doctor #fandomtea by #caramcgee, taking a stab at fair isle knitting, and learning C# on #udemy. #caffeinemakesmeoverlyambitious

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Hopping on the bandwagon and making a #2015bestnine. Thanks for all your love and support this year everyone! Here's to a great 2016 filled with even more nerdy nails and crafts, and maybe more pictures of me in ridiculously small spaces. You all seemed to enjoy that more than I anticipated lol 😋

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Finished my first ever knitted sock! 😃 Used Judy's magic cast on, toe up, short rows heel, and Elisabeth Zimmermann's sewn bind off methods. I always feel so invincible when I learn new techniques!

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Hello lovely followers!

I’ve just launched a self-hosted blog at www.bad-mushroom.com. It’s shiny and new, with updated images. I’ve made everything brighter (I didn’t realize all my images were kind of grey!) and the url watermarks are all consistent. It always drove me nuts that, because I changed URLs a few times, they were all over the place. But no more! Now my content has it’s own, cozy little home on the internet.

This is an exciting new step for me, and I hope that you’ll continue to follow me! I’ve got my RSS feed set up so you can get updates on your readers of choice. And they’ve been split up into categories, so if you want to see only my knit and crochet projects and not my nail art, you can do that. I’m also on Bloglovin so if you use their app, you can get updates there too.

Do not fret, though. I will still add my posts here on Tumblr, and of course I will still answer asks. I’d never leave you guys! This is just a new, slightly more organized way to access my content.

As always, I want to thank everyone for their support over the years. I never would have gotten to this point if I didn’t have your encouragement. You guys really mean so much to me! <3

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#BobRossOnTwitch nail art

Technical Walkthrough--

Despite being inspired by The Joy of Painting, there was very little joy involved in this process. Since you can't really work with oils and 2 inch brushes on nails, I used acrylics and a fine nail detailing brush. And borrowing a term from the master, I was in "agony city" the entire time. His wet-on-wet method doesn't work with quick-dry media. And it's even worse on a canvas smaller than a dime. So my trees aren't so happy. They're more like content trees.

The index finger has a hwite tip, which I created with handy dandy nail tape in standard French tip fashion. I overlapped a tree onto it in homage of Bob's penchant for drawing outside the bounds of his cutout paintings.

The thumbs have "Saved" and "Ruined" written on them, two words that chat loves to shout based on how poorly or well they think the paintings are going. "Saved" was written with a fine tip marker while "Ruined" was painted on with my brush and done with my non-dominant hand to add to the sloppiness.

Fun fact: the "Saved" nail can be read when upright, in a thumbs up position, and the "Ruined" nail can be read when downwards in a thumbs down position. I thought I was being clever. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

After several hours, cabinectomies, and happy accidents, I finished and sealed in all that goodness in with a top coat of clear Seche Vite.

Additional Comments--

Even before his arrival on Twitch, Bob Ross has been an important influence on my life. I remember watching The Joy of Painting as a kid. Back then, I wasn't well equipped and I painted on computer paper, on our glass coffee table, with an old watercolor set that my Mama had handed down to me, and synthetic brushes from a color by numbers book kit. But I didn't know or care. All I knew was that I enjoyed learning how to paint pretty things from the soft-spoken man with funny hair.

I remember that cabins were my favorite things to paint, and for years after all my drawings and paintings featured them. I wish I knew where they all were to show you guys. Maybe another day, after some serious cleaning and organizing.

At a certain point, I forgot about painting. As technology became more relevant, my interests shifted to pixel art, then coding. I eventually went off to school for it, and though I did take a painting class, it wasn't like painting with Bob. It's a lot less fun with the fear of a grade in mind.

Then 9 days ago, Twitch--a service known for live video game streaming--announced their latest channel: Twitch Creative. They had partnered with Adobe to encourage artists, crafters, musicians and creators of all kinds to share their creative processes. And since you're on my blog, you know I'm all about that!

To usher in the new channel, they marathoned every episode of The Joy of Painting, and I watched devotedly for all 9 days. Seeing Bob joyfully share his world full of happy trees for his critter friends to live in warmed my heart. His enthusiasm was undeniably infectious, as was his positivity. Only he could tame a crowd of 185k viewers and inspire them to spam things like #KEEPBOB and #THANKYOUBOB in a show of affection and gratitude.

Now that I'm running a creative blog and I'm at the point in my life where people are starting to look to me as a creative authority in a professional capacity, I've found a new appreciation for Bob Ross. As a child, I enjoyed watching because he taught me how to make pretty pictures that I could get my Mom to hang on the wall beside her bed. Now, I think there's a bigger lesson to be learned. Bob didn't create selfishly. He found a great joy in showing others how to unlock their creative potentials. He was gentle and encouraging. I know now that while it's satisfying to receive accolades and to take pride in what you've done, it's much more fulfilling to assist someone else in making something they can be proud of. You double the warm and fuzzy feelings. I think that Bob and his unwavering happiness were living proof of that.

So thank you, Bob, and thank you Twitch, for giving us a week of something good and pure, for reminding me of how joyful the process of painting can and should be, and for showing us the importance of community and creating beautiful things together.

GGWP and God bless.

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Hey, I was just wondering if the only way to down/up scale a pattern is with the type of wool/size hook you use? :)

The yarn/hook size is the easiest way to create an egg of a different size, but it’s definitely not the only way to upscale or downscale. 

(Haha, I had to make that pun at least once. Sorry!)

TO MAKE A BIGGER EGG—Base: Add 2/4/6/etc. more increase rows. The increase pattern is simple. Each row adds 1 more “hdc into the next stitch” than the previous row. Your final amount of stitches should always end with an addition of a multiple of 12 (i.e. 60/72/84/etc.). There’s a reason for this and I’ll get into it in the scales section. Just trust me for now.

I’d suggest adding the new rows before the final “hdc into each st” row. But to keep it even and rounded, you also have to shift rows.

Let’s break down 60 as an example. The original pattern has 4 increase rows, a straight hdc row, 3 increase rows, and another straight hdc row (4/1/3/1). You always want the first increase set to have 1 more row than the second. Since you’re adding 2 new rows, the new pattern would be 5/¼/1. So instead of

RND 5: [2hdc into first st, hdc into next 3 sts] 6 times (30)RND 6: hdc into each st (30)RND 7: [2hdc into first st, hdc into next 4 sts] 6 times (36)

it would shift to become

RND 5: [2hdc into first st, hdc into next 3 sts] 6 times (30)RND 6: [2hdc into first st, hdc into next 4 sts] 6 times (36)RND 7: hdc into each st (36)

And after that you’d keep making increases until you reach 60 stitches. Then you’d end with a straight hdc row.

So far so good?

Scales: If you divide the number of stitches you have on your last row of the base by 6, you’ll get the number of scales you’ll start with. So in my pattern, because I end on 48 stitches, it starts with 8 scales.

Okay, here’s why I mentioned that 12 is an important number. 2 rows creates 12 more stitches to the base. Think of it this way: there is 1 scale for every 6 stitches in the base. This happens because 2 foundation posts are worked into 6 stitches. A scale is worked onto every other post. So 1 scale every 6 stitches. Here’s a drawing to explain, in case you’re a visual learner:

To evenly increase the amount of scales, you have to add 2 scales. This is to keep the increases and decreases centered. So that’s why the base addition always has to be a multiple of 12.

So now that you have the amount of scales you want to start with, where in the following rows do you increase and decrease? We have to shift the foundation stitches in the same manner we shifted the base. This is the first increase row of the original pattern.

RND 3: ch2, dc into first post, ch2, INC, [foundation] 3 times, INC, [foundation] 2 times, 2sc b/w scale center (20 posts)

It goes INC/3/INC/2. Still working with our 60 stitch example, you’d have to add 2 more foundations. So it would become

RND 3: ch2, dc into first post, ch2, INC, [foundation] 4 times, INC, [foundation] 3 times, 2sc b/w scale center (20 posts)

INC/4/INC/3.

And decreases work the same way. So this

RND 15: ch2, dc into first post, ch2, DEC, [foundation] 4 times, DEC, [foundation] 3 times, 2sc b/w scale center (20 posts)

becomes

RND 15: ch2, dc into first post, ch2, DEC, [foundation] 5 times, DEC, [foundation] 4 times, 2sc b/w scale center (20 posts)

DEC/4/DEC/3 –> DEC/5/DEC/4

So that handles how to adjust the rows, but how many rows of each should you do? Well, that’s a little harder to formulate. Shaping the egg took the longest when I was patterning. And without testing, I can’t give you a definitive formula. However, to help, I’ve made a grid with my pattern.

Each box represents 1 scale. Feel free to take it into your editing program of choice, or to print it out and color it in. As long as you follow the basic shape that I’ve laid down, your egg should come out fine.

TO MAKE A SMALLER EGG—The same concepts apply if you want to make a smaller egg, just in reverse. So instead of adding rows and foundation stitches where I’ve indicated, remove them.

Shaping for a smaller egg is easier to estimate. I would suggest starting by keeping the ratio of scales to rows in accordance with how many you start with. For example, if you decreased the base stitches to 36, you’d start with 6 scales. The first 12 rows of the original pattern go 8/10x2/12x4/10x5. So for a 6 scale egg I’d try 6/8x2/10x4/8x4. It keeps within ratio of the original and removes one of the rows from the section with more consecutive rows.

And for both larger and smaller eggs, I suggest you always close with 3 scales.

I hope this helps. Good luck with your pattern! Let me know how it comes out. I’d love to see the result! =)

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Playing with acrylic paint!

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Okay, so this lady is so creative!  HookedbyAngel on Facebook makes these amazing little coffee cup cozies.  She says:

Crochet dog cozies designed to resemble different dog breeds. If you would like me to try a specific breed, leave me a comment on my Facebook page. Post a picture of your dog too! I may choose it as a model and recreate it’s likeness in yarn.

Love this idea!  So cute!