Story of the Furious Fowl - Crochet, Games, and Popcorn

How many of you have sat at home in the evenings, at family gatherings, etc and watched any number of adults and kids engrossed in the latest Angry Birds incarnation on their phone, ipad, or tablet pc? I'm betting all of you have at one point or another. I watched a couple of my nephews and nieces doing just this the weekend after Thanksgiving when we were visiting Steffie's parents.  It set into motion a plan to make the game a bit more interactive for everyone involved both player and spectator and started me to work on a new crafting project.

There are a lot of different Angry Birds related out there, some free and some for sale. I ended up using a combination of each of these as well as made up a couple of patterns on the fly.

The first item I made was a hat designed to look like one of the green pigs from the game. I used a basic adult sized beanie for the main hat portion. Then I made half moon shapes to form the ears before sewing them onto the hat. For the inside of the ears and the eyes, I did basic magic circles in black (for the inside of the ears) and white (for the eyes). For the nose, I started out with a magic circle and then only increased on two sides to form an oval instead of a circle. I sewed all of these elements on and added a few decorative stitches to finish things off. The hardest part about this particular element in the project was finding the safety eyes. Michaels in our area has stopped carrying them, Hancock Fabrics never carried them, and Joann Fabric and Crafts was out of them. I ended up picking up a few packages of safety eyes when I visited friends in Iowa because the only place I knew for sure would have them was Hobby Lobby. (Oh why can't we have a Hobby Lobby in the Twin Cities area?)

Now that the hat was complete, I needed birds to launch at the unfortunate soul chosen to be the green piggy. The Cardinal is my favorite of the birds, and I have to say it was my favorite of the crocheted hacky sacks that I made. There is a free pattern online for this particular bird that turned out awesome. The pattern can be found here on the Digital Mom Blog. Instead of filling the bird completely with fiber fill, sand, or dried beans, I opted to use a combination of cotton fill and popcorn kernels until I reached what I thought was the right weight.

I purchased the patterns for the rest of the birds from Pioneer Primitives Ravelry Shop. The patterns were fairly quick and easy. I will make a note in case you decide to purchase these patterns that the yellow triangle bird and the chicken are Very large compared to the other birds. For the chicken, I ended up using the body pattern for the blue bird in a size larger hook and then downsizing the beak from the original pattern to get a better sizing differential between it and the round birds. One other change I made to the chicken was to do the head feathers in red just because I thought it made it more chicken-like. I also downsized the pattern for the pattern by two hook sizes for the yellow bird for the same reasons.

I paired all of the birds and the hat together and gave the set to my father-in-law as a gift for Christmas. He and the grandkids seems to enjoy and be amused by the game. Who says video games have to be a bad thing? With a little creativity they can be inspiration for fun, social, interactive game for both kids and adults.