Ladies and gentlemen, we proudly present The Making of Halloween 2016:
Step 1: The Inspiration
Our house has been fairly Pokemon-heavy for the last few months. A daughter in upper elementary and a son in middle school who has a phone make us the definition of the target demographic for Pokemon Go and the entire Pokemon franchise. The Pokemon theme was an early decision.
Step 2: Which Pokemon?
We looked through pages of images of Gen 1 Pokemon to find critters that met our stringent qualifications of:
- Vaguely bunny or bear-shaped for ease of sewing (Mom's rule)
- Completely adorable (girls' rule)
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| Pikachu |
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| Vulpix. It turns out that this color scheme is for a "shiny Vulpix" but, whatever, it matched the fleece colors available at the fabric store. |
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| And we started sewing! (necklaces by WanYing) |
For weeks our dining room table has looked like this - some combination of fabric, sewing machine, solder, and LEDs. I think it's a happy sort of strange equilibrium state for us.
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| Vulpix - check! |
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| And so we began Pikachu |
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| Final steps- eye and ear placement |
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| Tah dah! The Pokemon are complete! |
But the saga was not over, no, not by a longshot. There were still 217 LEDs to get moving into poke stop-like colors configurations, attached to a Raspberry Pi, strapped to a kid, and attached to a three-wheeled unicycle.
Hours... and hours... and hours of programming later, the poke stop was complete!
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| The whole ensemble! |
Here's a video of the poke stop during the daytime:
But it's all so much more spectacular at night with the rotating poke ball and transition from blue to magenta!
Our work here is done. And now there is only candy.
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