Turtle Power

No, I haven't been hibernating for the past several days. Instead, I have been making yet another baby gift for my prodigiously procreative pals. And that means turtles, turtles (Rah rah rah, turtles turtles Ha ha ha --mmm I love Turtles). My current favourite stuffed toy pattern is the Sheldon tortue by Ruth Homrighaus. I just finished making my 3rd turtle in about 6 weeks.

What I like about it is that you get a really cute little stuffie in a lot less time that it takes to make a baby sweater, but (hopefully) impresses the parents to bits. One turtle I figure takes about 10-12 hours, including the sewing up, which is a bit more than average due to the multilayered nature of the toy. Yes, you guessed it, it comes apart for washing. Talk about coming out of your shell!

And the best part of it? People have literally fallen in love with this doll, taken the pattern and invented costumes for the darn thing. Everything from SuperTurtle outfits to pirate gear (Arrggh mateys). I haven't had time to sit down yet and make a set, but you can bet that the pirate gear is going to be joining my queue of things to make.

Here's my collection of turtles so far


BUT WAIT - THERE'S MORE!

In the spirit of this blog, I decided to try something I haven't done for 2 years. I made a little movie of one of the turtles and set it to music, using Windows Movie Maker. I've used iDvd and Garage Band before, so the technology was pretty familiar. I think it worked out pretty good. Here's the results:










Having used both the PC and Apple versions of movie making software, I have to say that Movie Maker is like the Dollar Store version of Apple's iLife suite. Both will give you the same basic merchandise, but Apple gives you so much more flexibility in terms of attaching sound bites and extending images, as well as visual effects. If I was buying a new system, iLife would definitely be one of the deciding factors.