As Halloween approaches, the Mario/Luigi costume for Noah is complete. However, his goodie basket was in shambles. So my creative wife decided to take up the task of creating a new basket for him. She wanted to use an old Spiderman head basket and construct a turtle shell over it. So to Hobby Lobby she goes, buys some foam paper, a Styrofoam ring and below is the result.


Side view of the basket. She cut each pattern out and taped on over the original basket. She tried the foam paper glue, but it sucked.


Top-side view.


Front view. The turtle head hole was designated as the right place to throw all the candy in. The black handle that you see sticking out is part of the original basket, which will help Noah a lot in carrying this thing around.


Bottom view. Again, she cuts the pattern out and tapes it.

To be honest, what she described to me on what she wanted to do with the materials she got, I thought it was going to turn out bad. But I was wrong. Never doubt my wife again, especially when she's pretty much the creative and artsy one in the family.

And Noah's reaction? Two thumbs up.

I'm a bigtime lurker over at the GAF forums and there was this one thread in particular that came up. It was about creating video game sprites out of Perlers. Perlers are these little plastic beads that you can buy online or at your local Hobby Lobby store. When reading through the topic, I had thought to myself, "Oh I have got do to this." We bought this huge bucket of miscellanious color Perlers, some other packages that had the peg boards and the usual colors already sorted out. So with some patience, practice and help from Noah because of my color-blindness, here are the results.








They are pretty easy to do and it acts as a little stress reliever for me, or being at least a little productive in doing something while I'm watching TV. Doing the 8-bit NES sprites were easy. Going up to the 16-bit sprites were a little more tough as the detail and color palatte is more widened, like the Sonic figure. And they are much bigger so in those cases, you will need at least two to four peg boards. However, for the Super Mario World sprites, I went with the GBA versions instead, as those colors were more simplistic and easier to do, however, I couldn't find anymore colors to match Luigi's face, so I went with the next best thing that I had at the time.

Try it out, it's easy, cheap to do and buy lots and lots of black. All of these figures are plastered all over Noah's room and on his front door. His recent fetishism with Megaman is now begging me to do all of the robots. Gonna need lots and lots of black.

On a recent trip to Toys'R'Us, we were browsing around and came upon the toy figures section. There was one area that was dedicated to video game figures, which included the Mario and Sonic little figurines that have been around for awhile. Right next to them we saw a new entry, Megaman. Both our eyes widen when we saw it. I was more amazed when there were other figures as well, Protoman, Elecman, Shadowman, and Gustman. And on the back of the package had Iceman and Woodsman (I think) coming soon. So we snatched up three of them ($10 each), as you can see them in the pic standing up against the 5" Mario figures.

The toys themselves are ok, just very limited on the movement of limbs, as you can move the arms up and down but for the legs, nothing. You can rotate the feet, hands/blasters and head and that's about it in terms of positioning. And there's no extras that come with them, in say switching arms/blasters or projectiles firing from them. It would've been nice, but to actually get a decent Megaman figure release here in the US, I'm fine with it. And Noah gives them two-thumbs up with wanting Snakeman, Airman, and Metalman next. Woah there cowboy, earn some money first.