toys – web-goddess

She’s everything. He’s just a monkey.

You didn’t think I forgot about the Oscars, did you? With one week to go, I’m happy to announce the fifteenth (semi-)annual Web-Goddess Oscar Contest has officially launched! 🎉

Time to put on Dua Lipa so you can dance the night away with Barbie and Ken…

This year you get two monkeys, each of which have two outfits. Barbie has her iconic pink gingham outfit from the start of the movie, as well as her Venice Beach rollerblading kit. Ken has his rollerblading kit too, as well as his Mojo Dojo outfit complete with custom fanny pack and fringed vest. And if you’re going to do a patriarchy, of course you need a fur.

Contest results: Congrats to Shilpa Anand, who got 12/13 predictions correct and tied with 3 other people for the top spot. It then went to the In Memoriam tiebreaker, where Shilpa managed to guess the EXACT number – 51. CONGRATULATIONS SHILPA!

More monkey construction info: The monkeys each have blue button eyes and (lots of) yarn hair. For the rollerblading outfits, why yes, that is the exact psychedelic neon print from their movie outfits, thank you for noticing! I found it on Spoonflower and had a fat quarter printed, which was more than enough. For the neon pink and yellow fabric, I bought some cheap high-vis shirts at Kmart and cut them up. Ken’s vest is made of fake leather from an old handbag, and his mohair coat is a Kmart cushion that I disassembled.

Web-Goddess Oscar Contest Sock Monkey History

Twenty-one years ago (😱), I thought it would be fun to run a contest and give away a sock monkey. I then kept that up for 10 years running, and you can see the history of my creations below. These days I only do it when the inspiration strikes…

2022 – Spider-Monkeys
2021 – Schitt’s Creek Sock Monkeys
2019 – Freddie Monkcury
2013 – The Avenger Monkeys
2012 – The Monkey with the Dragon Tattoo
2011 – Black Swan and White Swan ballerina monkeys
2010 – Sparkly Emo Vampire Sockmonkey playset
2009 – Batman and Joker monkeys
2008 – Striking Writer Monkey
2007 – Trio of Dream Monkeys
2006 – Gay Sock Monkey Cowboys
2005 – Soctopus
2004 – Plain sock monkey
2003 – Oscar the Sock Monkey

With great power comes great responsibility…

The fourteenth (semi-)annual Web-Goddess Oscar Contest has officially launched! 🎉 And this year you can win your very own set of Spider-Monkeys so you can act out scenes from No Way Home (or the meme!)

Each is crafted from a pair of Spider-Man socks, with felt eyes appliquéd. See? They’re very similar, but all slightly different. You can call them Peter 1, Peter 2, and Peter 3 if you like. (They’re a bit simpler than my original idea, but it turns out that the only person that wants a dirty, sexually repressed, toxically masculine Benedict Cumbermonkey is me.)

Entries are now closed!

The 2022 Academy Awards happen on Sunday, March 27th (California time), which is like 2am here. So I’ll cut off entries a few hours beforehand when I go to bed, and you’ll have to wait until I get up in the morning to find out who won!

Web-Goddess Oscar Contest Sock Monkey History

Nineteen years ago, I thought it would be fun to run a contest and give away a sock monkey. I then kept that up for 10 years running, and you can see the history of my creations below. These days I only do it when the inspiration strikes…

Ew, David.

The thirteenth (semi-)annual Web-Goddess Oscar Contest has officially launched! 🎉 And this year you can win everyone’s favourite family – the Roses of Schitt’s Creek.

No, I know they don’t have anything to do with movies. But honestly, I didn’t see many of the nominated films last year, and Schitt’s Creek brought me the most joy of pretty much any media. So that’s what I went with, and that’s what you win if you predict the most Oscar winners!

Go here to read the rules and ENTER! Contest has now closed!

More details on the monkeys:

David Rose’s outfit features a custom knit black sweater with embroidered white lightning bolts, as well as custom knit designer sneakers. The sneakers were based off the Little Converse pattern, while the sweater was made up entirely by me. He’s also wearing a pair of black framed spectacles (intended for an American Girl doll!).
Alexis Rose’s outfit is based off her iconic “A Little Bit Alexis” performance, including a dusty pink minidress and knee-high boots. She’s also got her iconic A necklace.
Johnny Rose is wearing a bespoke tailored suit, sewn by me from a pattern intended for American Girl dolls. (No joke – I paid $10 for it. 😳) He’s also got felt eyebrows for the perfect Eugene Levy touch.
Moira Rose is wearing an avant garde tunic dress made by me from sheer sequinned fabric and designer high heeled boots. She also has matching feather glitter earrings. And what would Moira be without her girls? You get four different wigs (attached with Velcro) to complete the whole wig wall scene.

If you want Steve, Patrick, or any of the other Schitt’s Creek residents to recreate the scene, that’s all on you. 😂

So go ahead and enter! The 2021 Academy Awards happen on Sunday, April 25th (California time), which is like 2am here. So I’ll cut off entries a few hours beforehand when I go to bed, and you’ll have to wait until I get up in the morning to find out who won!

Web-Goddess Oscar Contest Sock Monkey History

Eighteen years ago (good grief!), I thought it would be fun to run a contest and give away a sock monkey. I then kept that up for 10 years running, and you can see the history of my creations below. These days I only do it when the inspiration strikes…

2021 – Schitt’s Creek Sock Monkeys
2019 – Freddie Monkcury
2013 – The Avenger Monkeys
2012 – The Monkey with the Dragon Tattoo
2011 – Black Swan and White Swan ballerina monkeys
2010 – Sparkly Emo Vampire Sockmonkey playset
2009 – Batman and Joker monkeys
2008 – Striking Writer Monkey
2007 – Trio of Dream Monkeys
2006 – Gay Sock Monkey Cowboys
2005 – Soctopus
2004 – Plain sockmonkey
2003 – Oscar the Sock Monkey

Web-Goddess Oscar Contest 2019

A month or so ago, Christopher commented on Facebook how much he missed my annual sock monkey Oscar Contest. I admitted that I’d thought of reviving it, but I hadn’t had any inspiration for a good monkey… and then it hit me! FREDDIE MONKCURY.

I had a monkey mostly put together from a few years ago, so he took shape fairly quickly. I found a very basic pattern for doll pants in the right size and used material from an old pair of jeans. His “I Want to Break Free” outfit was a little harder. The “leather” for his skirt is actually polyurethane from a $5 bag I found at Kmart. His bouffant wig started out as sculptural felt that I then handsewed black chenille pipe cleaners onto. (I also fashioned a very basic vacuum cleaner too!)

Ready to submit your entry? Just head over to https://krishoward.org/oscars.html and register. I have a new system this year (more on that in a second) that allows you to return to update your predictions if you change your mind later. You can also see the current aggregate predictions.

Application Architecture

For the first 11 years, the Contest consisted of a custom PHP and MySQL application that I’d built. For this year, I decided to challenge myself to completely rebuild it on Amazon Web Services (which is where I work!). Here’s how the architecture ended up:

As a starting point, I worked through this Web Application serverless workshop. I was already using Route53 to serve krishoward.org from S3, so I decided to put the Contest files there. Upon finishing the workshop, I had a working web app using Amazon Cognito for user authentication and a serverless backend consisting of an API Gateway-fronted Lambda function that writes data to DynamoDB.

The next step was to customise it! After I changed the images and CSS to my own branding, the next thing to change was the data saved to the database – I changed it to a form with all the Oscar categories and nominees. Next, I wanted users to be able to review and update their votes, so I added another Lambda function that retrieves a logged-in user’s votes so the form can be populated correctly. I then added a third Lambda function that scans the complete database, processes the votes, and publishes an aggregate JSON file to S3. (This is triggered whenever the DynamoDB table is updated.) For actually displaying the prediction graphs, I used ChartJS.

I think that covers everything! Please have a go and let me know if you encounter any issues. Many thanks to the Snook (my rubber duck and eternal programming mentor) as well as David, Jody, and Amy for their help with testing.

Shrödinger’s Christmas Cat

For the Canva 2015 Kris Kringle gift exchange, I got a colleague who is mathematician and engineer. I tried stalking him on social media, but he doesn’t post very much. I knew that he’s into dark European films and quantum physics, so my genius idea was to knit him Shrödinger’s Cat!

You can find more details about the knitted cat over on Ravelry. Obviously, he’s alive on one side and dead on the other! To complete the experiment, I included a bottle of “poison” (ie vodka) and a container full of “radioactive material” (ie Kinder eggs). I packed it all into a cardboard box that I spraypainted silver (since it’s supposed to be steel) and decorated with “PROPERTY OF E. SHRÖDINGER” and “CAUTION: LIVE(?) ANIMALS” labels.

I’m very happy to report that the recipient was delighted with it. 🙂

How to Make a Sock Monkey

I published this tutorial back in 2004, and it’s been pretty popular! I’ve now ported it over to my new site. You’re welcome to link to it, but please don’t reproduce without my permission.

Little My Softie

I wanted to make a special present for my niece Cali, so I thought that I’d whip up a “Little My” softie. Little My is from the Moomin books, and she’s Cali’s favourite character. (I know because I sent her this Uniqlo t-shirt and she LOVED it.) So I started by downloading a line drawing and printing it out. I decided that I was only going to make a simple “two-dimensional” toy rather than try to translate her into full 3-D. I traced the drawing onto some felt and cut out the pieces. The trickiest bit was embroidering her face.

Embroidering the face

I used some acrylic yarn for the embroidery. Her features were done in black with a split stitch, and I used orange yarn to backstitch her hair (leaving long strands at the top to form her top-knot). Rather than bother with turning things inside-out, I just used a tight zig-zag stitch around the pieces (with wrong sides together) to sew the her head and body pieces together. For her hair, I actually tucked the long ends back down into her head before sewing her scalp so it couldn’t be pulled undone. It worked really well! I stuffed the head and body parts through the neck opening and then joined the two halves there. Then I zig-zagged across the neck to join and covered the resulting mess up with a cut-out pink bow-tie (tacked on by hand). I also zig-zagged around the arm openings (where her hands are on her hips) and then snipped out the inside bits. I had planned to use black felt for her hands and boots, but honestly I couldn’t be bothered at that point.

No big deal - just being the BEST AUNT EVER. #littlemy #handmade

The first thing my niece Indie said was, “Her head’s going to fall off I think!” Which may well happen. The whole thing was a bit of a bodge and I doubt it’ll hold up very wellâ€“the felt was starting to pill within a dayâ€“but I’ve decided to just treat it as a prototype. Cali absolutely loved it, and that’s all that matters! I’m thinking of redoing it in fleece and trying to make her a bit more three-dimensional next time…

Plush Hobbes

Hobbes Plush Hobbes
I was just updating my Crafts page and realised that I’d neglected to document the creation of Hobbes. This was my Christmas gift to my nephew Penn. He recently discovered Calvin & Hobbes books, so I thought he would love his very own Hobbes. I’d seen and bookmarked the Instructables tutorial a long time ago. The hardest part was finding the fleece! I was calling all over Sydney with no luck. Then Issy sent me a message that she’d found some in a remnant bag she’d just bought! She brought it over and TOTALLY SAVED CHRISTMAS. Anyhoo, I used the sewing machine for most of the basic tube construction. Then it was all hand sewing: assembling the tubes, sewing on the stripes, and sewing on his face. It took ages, and I had quite a blister on my finger! (I never did get the hang of using a thimble.) It was all worth it when Penn opened it on Christmas morning though. Within 24 hours I had to do emergency surgery on a split that had opened in his tail, but that’s what Aunts do, right? Tigers are meant to Have Adventures, not sit on a shelf. We should also have such a best friend!

Some construction photos:

The w-g Oscar Contest 2013

My ELEVENTH annual Oscar Contest is now open! If you pick the most correct answers, you’ll win a set of FOUR super-powered Avenger Monkeys! You get Captain America (with shield), Iron Monkey, Thor (with MjÃ¶lnir), and the Incredible Hulk Monkey. No, I didn’t do any of the lame human characters. If you want a monkey with an eyepatch or a bow and arrow, you can make your own. 🙂

And remember, in the event of a tie, the person that entered earlier wins. So don’t wait too long! Read on for more photos, or go here to enter.Here’s a body shot of Captain America Monkey. As you can see, he comes with a really sweet shield (painted by Mr. Snook himself!).

Captain America Monkey

A close-up of Cap’n’s face.

Captain America Monkey

Here’s Iron Monkey. (If you’re handy with electronics, you could make his Arc Reactor light up!)

Iron Monkey

And here’s his face. Sorry, Robert Downey Jr. not included.

Iron Monkey

Here’s Norse god Thor himself. He’s got a long red cape, flowing blonde locks, and a mystical hammer. (But don’t squish it too hard because it was sculpted out of clay, again by Mr. Snook.)

Thor Monkey

And here’s Thor’s close-up.

Thor Monkey

And lastly – HULK MONKEY SMASH!

Hulk Monkey

You can’t tell from the photos, but he really is bigger than the other 3. (Unfortunately socks don’t really allow for a lot of muscle definition, so I had to embroider his pecs on.)

Hulk Monkey

What are you waiting for? Go enter the contest!

Shared today on Instagram

Shared today on Instagram:

Happy Halloween! I brought some googly-eyed friends to work.