Queen Amidala (Barbie) doll cake

Made for a wonderful 6-year-old named Sophi's birthday. The cake is 3 layers, carved to the shape of a dress, with a center hole for Barbie. Since I think those cake pick dolls are kind of creepy once you remove the cake, I wanted to use a real doll, so I wrapped the doll in plastic wrap to keep things as sterile as possible.

The headdress is assembled out of self-adhesive craft foam sheets with a rhinestone added. I styled the doll's hair as much like Amidala's as possible but did not paint her face (on purpose -- we wanted to keep the doll looking more like its recipient than accurate to Star Wars).

The dress is made of red fondant with piped trim and gold doily details.

R2D2 hat

I knit this hat based on a design by Carissa over at Carissa Knits. It actually took me two attempts to get it right. The first time, I followed Carissa's pattern but decided to use a stranded (or Fair Isle) technique for the blue blocks instead of using duplicate stitch as she suggests. The problem with using the stranded method for this hat was I found that it made the colorwork sections have some strange puckering, and overall I didn't like the way it looked. So I ripped that out and started anew.

The second time around, I knit a striped hat like the pattern calls for and added the details afterward using duplicate stitch (or overknitting) and a little bit of crochet. This turned out rather nicely. I modified Carissa's pattern, however, when I noticed that the top of R2's head is actually somewhat different from the version in her hat. I also changed some of the details and instead of using the projecting bits, I just made colored circles on the hat where they would be.

(Yarn: Cascade Cash Vero in 030, Cascade 220 in 9457, scraps of black and dark grey. Hat models: Vichu, R2D2)

IT guy comic: Disaster recovery

Check out my new comic over on the Network Hub blog... it has a Star Wars reference.