This blog is so focused on crochet that I didn’t think I could repurpose it to cover my more general interests.  I mean let’s face it, these recent soap/shaving entries are way out of place.  So I started a new blog.

It’s called That Thing I Like and you can find it over here, if you’re interested.  So far I’ve talked a lot about my nails, a little bit about shaving, and a bit here and there about cooking and my kids.  I may talk crafting when the mood strikes, maybe even crochet.  Either way, I don’t have much to add to this blog for now.  Come find me in that other place!

First of all, most of what you find in a grocery store or drugstore “soap” aisle is going to be detergent based.  They’re cheaper and faster to manufacture with less fuss.  If you’re fine with that, fine. The rest of this article isn’t for you.

If you want soap soap, really actual real soap, you’re going to need to read ingredients.  But before that, you’re going to need eyes.  Using your eyes, look at the product.  Is it solid or liquid?  Liquid?  Probably a detergent.  Not true in all cases, don’t yell at me Dr Bronner’s fans.  You can find liquid soap, but that means the soap has been diluted in water.  If convenience is your demand, go for it.  I like concentrated block soaps.  I’ll dilute it my damn self, thankyouverymuch!

So take those big bottles of liquid cleansers and chuck them out.  Find bar soaps.  You’re probably staring vacantly at a 6-pack of Dial Gold.  Look at the ingredients.  Hm… wait a second, that’s not soap at all!  That’s a detergent bar!  Remember the slogan from my previous entry: Soap: It’s 2 Things.  Neither of those 2 things is listed.  No sodium hydroxide, no oil, NO SOAP!  Right?

Now, to be fair (and I’m editing to be fair because I felt a little guilty about skimming over this information) the ingredients list sodium tallowate and sodium coconate.  That’s another way of indicating the results of saponified tallow and coconut oil.  Yeah, it’s soap, but the addition of the remaining items in the list make it less soap and more soap-ish.  It’s soapish.

Allow me to draw your attention to one particular giveaway: sodium laureth sulfate. That right there is a foaming agent.  It literally exists to do nothing but make foam.  Sodium laureth sulfate is in tons of stuff.  It makes your shampoo bubble, it makes your toothpaste foamy and actiony feeling, it’s basically there to make you feel like the product is doing something because it gets whipped up and the sensation changes.  You don’t need sodium laureth sulfate.  It’s a mind game.  And if you see sodium laureth sulfate, you’re surely not looking at soap.

Should you care about sodium laureth sulfate?  I mean, if it’s in everything and you’ve never had a bad reaction, who cares?  You’re right, maybe you don’t need to care.  But if you’ve experienced redness or itching or discomfort in your hygiene routine you might be interested to know that sodium laureth sulfate is a common irritant.  Sensitive skinned individuals might want to experiment with eliminating it from their routines.

Okay back to the grocery aisle.  Most of these things are detergents.  Some of them might be actual factual soaps.  But wait!  There’s another pitfall.  Most large scale commercial soap manufacturers do one additional production step you should be aware of.  Let me explain.

Glycerine.  We’re all aware of the existence of glycerine soap.  Highly recommended for its soapy performance, it’s a wonderful thing.  It’s a natural humectant, which means it draws moisture to itself.  If you’re soaping up with it, the idea is that it draws moisture into itself and, by proximity, your skin.  But too much glycerine can get greedy and draw moisture out of your skin by the same proximity.

Interestingly, glycerine is created during the process of traditional soapmaking.  Natural actual factual soaps contain glycerine and possess that humectant property.  Sometimes you’ll see glycerine specifically called out as the base of artisan soaps, or a product will claim to contain more glycerine.  This is good.  Glycerine is good.  But commercial soap operations typically extract the glycerine from their end products.  That’s right, the commercially manufactured soap in your grocery store was probably robbed of its lovely glycerine.  Why?  Why would they do such a thing??  SO THEY CAN PACKAGE IT AND SELL IT AS PURE GLYCERINE SOAP!  That’s right, they make beautiful, nourishing natural soap, extract some of the good stuff, and sell the good stuff to you separately.  Buyer beware.

If you’re lucky or if you’re at a Whole Foods or a Trader Joes you might find actual factual soap crafted by small operations.  Hooray!  If not you might try a bath shop at the mall or something.  Better yet, you can shop online.  But buyer beware, soapmaking isn’t error-proof.  You need to buy from someone who can do math.  And put your skeptic cap on, because you’re about to see a lot of absurd claims.

Soap: It’s 2 things.  Make that your mantra. As you look for soaps ask yourself what each of the additional ingredients are intended to achieve.  Want help?  Why sure.  A couple of entries ago I listed one of my recipes.  Here it is again:

Ingredients: Olive Oil, Canola Oil, Coconut Oil, Lavender Tea, Sodium Hydroxide, Wildflower Honey, Grapeseed Oil, Salt, Lavender Buds, Lavender Essential Oil

To break it down again, it contains oils (olive, canola, coconut), lavender tea (the water the lye is dissolved in), honey (sugar promotes lather), salt (salt promotes hardness), lavender buds (exfoliators) and lavender essential oil (smells good).

Why three oils?  Because different oils have different saponification values and yield different results.  Blending them can give you the best of multiple worlds together in one product.  A pure olive-oil soap (castile soap) is lovely stuff, but it’s very soft.  A pure coconut oil soap lathers like the dickens but can be very drying.  I personally looked at each oil I selected and thought about what qualities it would bring to the party before finalizing my calculations.  I wanted a hard bar, so I used coconut oil and added salt.  I wanted to mitigate the drying quality of coconut oil so I added in olive and canola oil.  To make sure I didn’t kill my latherability factor I included honey to give it a boost.  Every soapmaker should consider these qualities, but educating yourself about the basic ingredients helps.

Understand that saponification is a chemical dance.  Lye likes fatty acids.  But oils aren’t simply fatty acids.  There are additional compounds suspended in the oils that give them their individual characteristics.  Compare a bottle of grapeseed oil to a bottle of hempseed oil.  Give them a sniff and a swirl.  Very different.  These other things are technically impurities.  Impurities we like, some of them very beneficial, but impurities nonetheless.  Essentially what a soapmaker is trying to do is saponify a quantity of oil and leave the impurities behind in the body of the product.  These impurities lend performance variations among the various results.

Anyway, what else is in there?  Lavender tea.  Does that really do anything?  Up for debate.  Lavender is great for your skin and promotes new skin cell growth.  However, lye heats up significantly during soapmaking and it’s unclear whether those beneficial compounds survive the chemical cook process.  Basically when you see water solutions like that on a soap ingredient list, the soapmaker is telling you, “I hope the impurities I’ve introduced to this water survive and pass along some benefit to your skin.”  I experimented quite a bit with my water.  In some cases I used diluted mango or pear nectar.  The outcome was definitely impacted and the soaps behaved differently.  The sensation of the soaps was quite pleasurable, but it would take significant scientific study to know whether any actual skin benefits resulted.

Let’s look at the last ingredient.  Essential Oil.  Note that Essential Oil is not the same thing as fragrance.  Essential oil is literally oil extracted from a source.  Lavender essential oil is oil extracted from lavender.  Smells good, man.  Fragrance oil is a synthetic chemical concoction that smells pretty.  Manufacturers are not required to report the chemical makeup of fragrances.  Soapmakers who use fragrance oils may not even know the chemical ingredients because the wholesalers they purchased them from are under no obligation to report them.  If you’re having a skin reaction to a product, look for fragrances first.  And if you’re the type to be concerned about product safety, you might note that cosmetic product activists have expressed significant concern about the potential use of unreported carcinogens in fragrances. It’s up to you to do your own research and decide where you want to land on that issue.

Some more additives to consider: Clay, silk protein, nut butters and goat’s milk.

• Clay is a common ingredient in shaving soaps.  Clay results in a smooth, silky, rich lather. The two most commonly used clays in soap are kaolin or bentonite.  Clays are also claimed to draw impurities out of the skin, although in a soap application it seems unlikely it would remain on the skin long enough to do so.
• Silk proteins are literally derived from pulverized silkworm cocoons.  The idea is that they impart a silky and luxurious feel to the product.  Note the word “feel.”  Silk proteins are a perception additive, like scent.  How a product feels is important, of course, but adds little to the performance or effect on your skin.
• Nut butters like shea, cocoa and mango are dense oils expressed from pressed kernels.  They are extremely rich emollients.  That means they improve the softness, flexibility and pliability of your skin.  Their dense natures make them coat your skin and promote the retention of moisture. Typically included for superfatting purposes.
• Goat’s milk is extremely common in soap and has been used for hundreds of years.  Goat’s milk is highly fatty with very small fat globules that make it naturally homogenized. The fat content of goat’s milk is not typically calculated for saponification and thus results in a superfatted product.  Note that goat’s milk contains naturally occurring sugar, which can scorch during the lye chemical “cook” phase, yielding an orange color.  There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s just what happens when you use milk in your lye solution.  Expect it.

Nut butters and goat’s milk bring me to the last thing I want to mention: Superfatting: Superfatted soap contains more oil than the lye requires to fully saponify.  If it requires 1 part lye to saponify 1 part oil, a superfatted soap might include 1.25 parts oil, with the goal of leaving some unconverted oil suspended in the body of the final product.

Benefit to you? Some oil remains on your skin to protect it as your acid mantle regenerates.  Is this benefit real?  Absolutely, no doubt about it.  Superfatting is important to any good soap recipe to ensure you’re not totally stripped clean.  That “squeaky clean” feeling is a lack of oil.  Washing removes your natrual ooze, superfatted soap puts some back.  When nut butter or goat’s milk or other fatty ingredients are included in a soap recipe, they’re typically not calculated into the saponification equation.  The lye is calculated against the base oils, expecting the fatty acids to be completely consumed in the process, and the extra butters or fatty products are expected to remain.

Word to the wise: Superfatting should never exceed 20%.  If you find a soap that claims a superfatted value you might want to stick closer to 10-15%.  The reason is that the oil can go rancid eventually.  You want enough oil to produce desired results, but not so much that the bar can go bad.  I typically superfatted conservatively at 5%.

So that’s soap.  That’s all I have to say about it for now.  I might say more later, particularly shaving soap, but that’s enough for today.

Here’s the thing, what ends up on your skin affects how your skin behaves.  Most of us want calm, evenly toned, un-hurty skin.  There’s no one path to that goal, but what you use in your journey can affect how hard it is to get there.  So let’s talk about skin.

Your skin is more than just skin.  Meaning, it’s not just that pink/tan/brown stuff that covers your bones and keeps the blood in.  It’s a barrier comprised of various features that ultimately seek to keep harmful bacteria and gunk out.  You’ve got hairs, you’ve got living cells, you’ve got dead cells on top of that, you’ve got sweat and sebaceous glands.  Your personal hygiene routine should accommodate all of those things.

Western culture has taught us that squeaky clean is ideal for skin and hair, but that’s simply not true. Zest “soap” commercials even featured an actress squeaking her finger down a glass shower door to show how “clean” you could be.  But there’s a cost to being squeaky clean.  it leaves you oil-free, sweat free, sebum free, and more receptive to microbial invaders.

That’s right, oil you’ve been taught to fear actually keeps you healthy.  Which doesn’t mean you should just quit showering entirely and walk around all greasy every day.  There’s a healthy balance.  That healthy balance is your acid mantle. To put it in the most basic terms, the acid mantle is a combination of sweat and sebum that forms an ultra-fine coating on your skin and keeps it waterproof and resistant to bacteria.  What’s sebum?  It’s the oil that is excreted from sebaceous glands through tiny ducts in your hair follicles.  I want to point out that all of these blog posts started because of shaving, and here we come back to the importance of those dastardly hairs. Curse you, mammalian biology!

Anyway, the point is you’re walking around in a shelac of your own making.  You’re literally oozing it from your pores.  That sounds gross and might make you run for the shower.  But wait!  That ooze possesses a singular quality that makes it pretty bad-ass.  It’s acidic.  That’s right, superhero wannabe, your body oozes acid YEAH MAN!  Okay so it’s pretty mildly acidic, a pH of around 4-5, but it’s acidic nonetheless.  It’s acidic enough to wreck the devious plans of bacteria and fungus that would love to set up camp on your delicious organic body.

So what you use to clean your skin, and thus your acid mantle, is important.  Here’s where soap comes in.  As mentioned in my previous post, soap is a combination of lye, which is alkaline, and a fatty acid.  When soap is manufactured a careful calculation is made to balance the right proportion of lye with the amount of oil.  We’re talking saponification value.  Saponification value is the number of miligrams of lye required to saponify (turn into soap) 1 gram of fat.

Let’s all take a moment to think about that scene in fight club where lye meets skin in the lipo-soap scene…. good times.

Lye is highly caustic.  It burns like hell, it can eat through your skin, it can cause blindness.  Don’t mess around with lye unless you’re fully educated and taking appropriate safety precautions.  It’s super duper alkaline and if you don’t add the right amount of oil to consume all of that lye in the saponification process you’re going to end up with highly alkaline soap.  I’m taking about a pH over 12.  So math is a must, and litmus strips help.

It’s important to note that even a perfectly calculated soap recipe with a proper balance between oil and lye will yeild an alkaline product.  That means a pH somewhere between 8-10, usually closer to 10.  If you see artisan soapmakers claiming a pH of 7, run away.  They’re probably lying.

So let’s think about that.  Your skin is acidic.  Soap is alkaline.  Wat do?

Many opponents of pure soap will tell you that the alkaline nature of soap disrupts your valuable acid mantle.  The purpose of pH-balanced products, typically detergents, is to provide cleansing with less pH conflict with your skin.  Is there something to that logic?  Perhaps.  But consider this: Your skin is constantly regenerating its acid mantle.  It’s an ongoing process.  In fact if you were to completely strip your acid mantle your body would fully regenerate it in 14 hours.  Soap, particularly mild soap, is unlikely to completely strip you.  One more item to consider: splashing your face with pure water disrupts and removes some of your acid mantle.  It’s on your skin.  It comes off.  It just does, and your body is designed beautifully to accommodate and recover.

In fact, the benefit of pure soap may outweigh the pH risk, if indeed one exists.  Recall the Zest commercial with the squeaky finger.  Their claim was that “soap leaves a sticky film that won’t rinse away.”  Yeah, that’s oil.  That’s skin protecting, skin nourishing oil.  Unlike strong detergent bars that strip your acid mantle and put nothing back in its place, soap naturally coats the skin and provides some interim protection as your acid mantle self-corrects.  Folks with acne pay attention: strong detergents that strip your skin completely leave it vulnerable to invading bacteria.  It’s not oil that causes pimples.  It’s bacteria in the oil ducts.  While too much sebum can clog pores and promote pimples, no sebum at all essentially puts out the welcome mat for acne-causing bacteria. Stripped clean is not a good clean.

But what if you want to play it safe and heed the concerns about alkaline products?  Well, now you’re looking at using detergents.  The all-natural community would fall to the ground wailing and gnashing their teeth at such an idea.  But let’s face it, natural doesn’t always mean better.  I mean, poison ivy is natural.  There are plenty of products that use mild detergents that could be perfectly fine for your face.  It comes down to how your skin reacts.  And it requires a lot more experimentation and careful ingredient research.  A pH neutral detergent may not be all that beneficial if the cleansing action strips your acid mantle anyway.

Detergents frequently are multi-ingredient concoctions of chemicals.  Again, chemicals are not necessarily a bad thing.  But the more ingredients a product has, the harder it can be to identify the one that makes you all red and hurty after a wash. Frequently some of the chemicals have a natural odor, so fragrances are required just to even make a product smell odor-neutral.  Chemicals may be required to fix the color to make it appealing.  Any of these additives can cause a dermatological reaction and figuring out which one can be a nightmare.  Take it from a rosacea gal, long lists of ingredients do not make things easier.

One final word on acid mantles as they pertain to shaving:  You’re friggin’ shaving.  You’re pulling a fine steel blade across the surface of your skin close enough to make bristly hair undetectable.  You’re scraping off your acid mantle anyway.  All of this fuss about pH balanced detergents or quasi-soaps is sort of a red herring because the very action of shaving is removing your acid mantle anyway.  Focus your energies on your post-shave routine and ask yourself what kind of performance you want out of your lather-generating product.

Most traditional wet shaving methods rely on the old school soap and brush lather.  If that’s your thing, start checking ingredients.  Do you want a soap?  Do you want a detergent?  If you want my personal opinion, I’d urge you to stick with real soap.  Soap is going to be more protective and give you a smoother glide.  In most cases.  There are very few universals in life.  And as they say, your mileage may vary, so choose what works best for you.

Up next: how to shop for soap.

Question: Why should you give a damn about soap?
Answer: Because what you put on your skin affects how your skin looks and feels.

Let’s start with the basics.  What is soap?  Most people use the word “soap” the way they use “kleenex.”  Rather than referring to a very specific product, they’re referring to a product category.  To get technical, soap is the result of a combination of an alkali and a fatty acid.  More specifically, it’s usually the combination of sodium or potassium hydroxide and some kind of oil.  Let’s use one of my simpler recipes as an example.  Don’t worry, I’m out of business so I make no money by promoting my stuff:

Ingredients: Olive Oil, Canola Oil, Coconut Oil, Lavender Tea, Sodium Hydroxide, Wildflower Honey, Grapeseed Oil, Salt, Lavender Buds, Lavender Essential Oil

Let me break that down.  You have a blend of fatty acids (Olive oil, canola oil, grapeseed oil) and sodium hydroxide.  Congrats, It’s soap!  In addition you have lavender tea (the water base in which the lye is dissolved), wildflower honey (sugar promotes lather), salt (salt improves hardness), lavender buds (exfoliator) and lavender essential oil (smells good).

The bottom line: When you look at the ingredients of a true soap you should see two ingredients: Sodium or Potassium Hydroxide and at least one oil.  Everything else is bonus.  Take away the fragrances and exfoliants and other additives and you’ve still got soap.  Take away the sodium hydroxide and oil and you’ve got a yucky mess that won’t clean a damn thing.  Here’s a slogan for you: Soap: It’s Two Things.  Snappy.

That beings us to the next question: What is NOT soap?  Well, everything else.  If it ain’t soap, it’s a detergent. Plenty of commercial “soaps” contain and rely on detergents for their cleaning power.  Remember the old commercials for Zest, where it proudly proclaimed that it wasn’t soap?  They were right, the cleansing action of their bars came from detergents.

So how do you know what you’re buying?  Look at the language and read ingredients.  If you look at a commercial bar of soap and you start getting into long, complex chemical names you’re probably looking at a detergent bar.  And watch the marketing language.  Beauty bar, deodorant bar and cleanser are all flags that tell you you’re not looking at soap, or at least not entirely soap.

Now, this brings me to the controversial part: Is soap really better than detergents?  Soap aficionados would say yes, are you crazy?  But the real answer is a bit more complicated because it all depends on effect it has on your skin.  I’ll cover that in my next entry.

Last fall I discovered a fabulous subreddit called /r/wicked_edge.  At the time I was looking for a birthday present for my husband and I’d gotten fixated on the idea of his daily shaving routine.  He’s a big guy with a tough beard and he also happens to shave his head.  That’s a lot of hair removal that he does fairly frequently.

I’ve stood in the grocery store shaving aisle with him as he grimaced at various multi-blade cartridge razors, and tried to help suggest products and ingredients for pre- and post-shave skin care.  What I gleaned from all of this was a sense that shaving wasn’t comfortable.  It was a laborious task that had to be done and more often than not left him feeling bumpy and raspy.  He wasn’t getting the results that the chore deserved.

Now, I’m a bit of a bath product junkie.  I’ve often said that if I won the lottery my first big purchase would be the entire contents of a Walgreen’s store, just so I could try out every product.  I’ve even made and sold my own hand-crafted artisan cold process soaps (proof: my old Etsy store).  I’m not a particularly appearance-focused gal, and in spite of how it sounds I’m actually extremely low maintenance.  I like hygiene products and processes but I don’t like over-engineered solutions.  And there’s nothing more over-engineered than a multi-blade cartridge razor.

Which is why I ended up at Wicked Edge.  What I found was a dedicated and intelligent community that recognized that engineering doesn’t solve every problem.  Strongly focused around double edge safety razors, but also supporting single edge and straight razors, the community provides guidance and expertise for people who want a superior shaving experience.

I spent a couple of months doing research before making my decision.  I bought a Merkur 180, since it seems to be the most commonly recommended model for first-timers.  I also bought a Van Der Hagen badger brush, ceramic bowl and shaving soap.  Fortunately my husband was thrilled with the gift and we were both immediately amazed with his results.  No cartridge shave came close to what he gets out of a traditional wet shave.  His skin tone is smooth and even and he says it’s the first time he’s ever had a comfortable shave in the mustache region.  In the 10 years I’ve known him, I’ve never felt his skin so smooth and soft.  We’re sold!

And frankly, I’ve been so impressed that I’m now in the process of switching my leg shaving over to the DE experience.  To experiment I shaved one leg with the Merkur and the other leg with a Gillette Venus.  The Merkur was simply a closer shave and left my skin smoother, shinier and more even in tone.  So my next purchase is an Edwin Jagger De89.  My husband and I will duke it out over who gets it when it arrives.

But anyway, back to the soap thing.  Because I have a history with soaps and skin care I started thinking about shaving soaps.  While any soap experience should be suited for your skin, a shaving soap is going to get even closer, just by the nature of wet-shaving.  Why does this matter?  The next blog entry will be all about soap, cleansers and detergents, and why you should give a damn.

Heisenberg Walt, Jesse and a baggie of blue meth

It’s a small effort, considering the large projects I was doing last spring.  But it’s better than no crochet at all.  I’m probably going to have to keep the scale small for a while until my wrist is fully operational again.

Oh and by the way, I created a Google Plus page.  Wanna see?  There’s not much there yet but I like the platform.

Xanadoodle

on Google+

People sometimes think the most insulting thing you can say to a creative person is, “I don’t like it.” And while that may sting a bit, most of us understand that creating something and sharing it means accepting some negative feedback.

In reality the most insulting comment is, “You have too much time on your hands,” or “Must be nice to have time to do that.”  See, negative feedback means you at least looked at it, evaluated its merit and offered a quantitative or qualitative opinion. That’s not insulting. The casual dismissal of effort is far more insulting.

I’m sure you’ve seen it, you’re browsing Reddit or Digg or Youtube or whatever user-submitted-content-comment-heavy site you prefer, and someone shares, say, a video of the boulder sequence from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” rendered entirely in papercraft*, and within the first 5 comments someone pipes up with the following observation:

“Someone has too much time on their hands.”

Somehow that comment is more insulting and cutting and crushing than any possible critique of technical execution or loyalty to the source material. We creatives can defend our artistic direction, but when our work is dismissed as the result of misused and maybe undeserved idle time, it’s like a slap in the face.

I’ll give a more concrete example. I’ve shared my crochet characters here and elsewhere online. I’ve received great feedback and I’ve enjoyed seeing what other Lost and Mad Men and Firefly fans and yarn-addicts have created. Back when they were newly finished I brought my Li’l Losties into work to put them on my desk and almost immediately a coworker approached to investigate. She asked for a few details, told me it was a “weird” project (no argument there), and then she said it: “You have too much time on your hands.”

The thing is, I don’t have too much time on my hands. Who does? I work full time, commute an hour each way, and I have 2-year-old twins to care for. I get a couple hours after the boys are in bed each night to do something, ANYTHING, and most of the time that anything-thing isn’t very fun. It’s laundry or working out or running to the grocery store.  And that’s after an exhausting commute, cooking and serving dinner, passing toddlers through bath and bedtime routine, no fewer than 5 bedtime stories, and several return trips upstairs to escort newly potty-trained children to the bathroom.

I scrape together a few, brief free moments when I can tackle a project, and that may mean staying up an hour later and going to work extra tired the next day if necessary. That’s how it works with creativity, it’s not a result of lounging around idle time. It’s the result of ideas that beg to be brought into reality, for whatever reason, purely for the joy of creation. We’re not lazy layabouts with nothing to do, we’re people who cram creative time in when we can. It’s the mortar between blocks of busywork.

I haven’t yet been able to come up with a good response to the “too much time” remark. The polite thing would probably be to ignore the comment, but sometimes I feel like it deserves a response. I told my coworker that it was a better use of my evening time than zoning out in front of the TV and doing nothing. It was my attempt to point out to her that we all have time to be creative, if you don’t waste it on being uncreative. Her response was a sincere, “Oh I don’t know about that…”

So maybe there’s nothing that can be said to these people. If they’re sure zoning out slack-jawed at “Two and a Half Men” is fulfilling and, more importantly, less indicative of “too much free time,” I’m not sure there’s any response that would be worth saying.

What’s important is that we know it’s worthwhile.  How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.  It’s not what you build that matters, it’s the building.  Additional poetic image not found.

(*Note: not a real example. Don’t go searching YouTube for this mythical video.)

Hypnotoad - A Tribute to Futurama

That’s right, I crocheted a “life-sized” Hypnotoad from Futurama.  Why?  Because everybody loves Hypnotoad.  He’s my second favorite Futurama character, next to Hedonism Bot.

The best part, in my humble opinion, is the sound module in the left foreleg that plays the infamous Hypnotoad sound.  Want to hear it?

More pictures after the cut.

Vital Stats:

Size: 22″L x 21″W x 10″H
Weight: Approx 2 lbs 5 oz
Materials: 4 1/2 skeins of Lion Brand Wool-Ease lamb’s wool acrylic blend yarn (approx 886 yards)
Eyes: DIY craft ornaments with a plastic core and paper exterior.  Hand-painted and finished with 3 coats of high-gloss sealer.  Eyelids are crocheted to fit and stitched to the head.

Do you want to see how he started out life?  Here’s a grotesque glimpse of the body construction before legs and eyes were added and before the mouth was closed:

One last shot to show you the scale of this abomination.  In case you were wondering, he’s toddler-sized.

The crisis in Japan is ongoing as more aftershocks roll in and people whose homes were destroyed begin the long process of rebuilding their lives.  Please convo me on Etsy if you’re interested in making a donation to Japan Relief by commissioning a project.