Violet's Vegan Comics

If you look back at Part 3 of the bus-making process you will see how I started work on the wheels and the floor. This is how I finished them:

It turned out after all that the toothbrushes weren’t quite long enough to use as a single axle between two wheels so I used four – one for each wheel.

First, by whatever means you have available, cut off the bristle end. Careful – watch your fingers!

Push a toothbrush into the centre of the wheel (see how to make the wheels in part 3) so that it reaches all the way through but doesn’t stick out further than the width of the wheel. Then hold a pen loosely against the other side of the wheel and mark a line across the toothbrush inside the inside edge of the wheel.

Then take the wheels back off and securely tape the toothbrushes to the underside of the bus floor (the card you have already cut out as shown in part 3) so that the pen marks line up with the edge of the card as shown above. The wheels won’t be exactly in line across the bus because each wheel has a separate axle but that doesn’t matter, you won’t be able to tell when it’s all finished.

Then turn the ‘floor’ over and stick some decorative paper to it. It can be anything you fancy – it’s going to be the Andersons’ lino floor. If you don’t have any decorative paper that you like you could draw/paint/print some tiles of your own design, either directly onto the card or onto a separate piece of paper that you then stick to the card. Just don’t get the card wet.

The paper I used wasn’t quite long enough to cover the very back of the bus floor (see above), but since I knew the bed was going to cover the back I decided it didn’t matter.

Get the bottomless bus and carefully turn it upside down. Be especially careful of the piece that sticks up at the front so as not to bend it – I made sure mine was hanging over the edge of the cushion the bus stood on. Position the bus floor like so ↑ and lay the knitted rectangle you’ve made (which is almost, not quite, the size of the floor – see part 3) across the top of it.

Put a couple of stitches in each corner to hold it in place …

… and then sew all the way round, stretching it in line with the bus ‘walls’ as you go. When you get to the wheel axles, just sew around them and keep going.

When you’ve done that, you can put the wheels back on 😀

And there you have it! 😀 Be gentle, those wheels will come off quite easily. And of course, if you’ve used toothbrushes like me, they won’t go round. But they will look nice and, after all, Old Red has retired now so she just wants to sit still 🙂

And there’s a nice new floor!

That’s it for now. Today I’m going to make a wood-burning stove out of this pill bottle ↓ I’ll tell you about it tomorrow 😀

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Click here for Part 6

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vegan, vegetarian, toys, homemade, crafts, needlework, knitting, sewing,

It’s perhaps not as cool as a sports injury but, when you’re too excited to pace yourself, a repetitive strain injury is just as inconvenient. I have been knitting for several hours a day for about two weeks with no ill effects but after making the bus’s wheels I had such bad shoulder pain that I had to take a break. It seems feeble because all I was doing was winding yarn around a cardboard circle, over and over – it’s not what you would call hard work. But there it is. I’ve been stopped in my tracks 🙂

This is what I’ve got so far:

I decided to make the bus wheels by cutting out cardboard circles which are a little bit smaller than the required (guessed) bus wheel size, cutting a smaller circle out of the middle of them, and winding yarn around them like you would if you were making pompoms. Unlike when you’re making pompoms, you only need one cardboard circle per wheel, and you stop winding just before you get to the centre, leaving a tiny hole in the middle for the axle.

The axles are going to be old toothbrushes which just happen to be a little bit wider than the bus.

I didn’t have any black yarn but decided that doesn’t matter – groovy people like the Andersons would probably enjoy having different coloured wheels 🙂

When I’d finished the wheels I needed a floor to attach them to. I’m no longer following the pattern so this is an experiment which I hope will work. I’m winging it.

I drew around the bottom of the bus on cardboard and cut it out.

Then I cast on enough stitches to cover about two thirds (or nearly three quarters) the width of the bus floor. I haven’t proved this works yet, but the knitting will naturally get wider than the cast-on row and I want the finished piece to be slightly smaller than the cardboard so that it has to be stretched taut to cover it. It remains to be seen whether I cast on the right amount of stitches to make it work.

dot dot dot 😉

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click here for Part 4

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vegan, vegetarian, crafts, knitting, paper crafts, sewing, homemade, homemade toy, model bus, model furniture, children’s toys