I’ve been trying to take a bit of a break from the internets lately - too many kerfluffles to suffer, I say! - so this week I’ve kept myself occupied with two of my favorite things: FSMas crafts and Lost. On Monday, I churned out a Duggar family’s worth of Flying Spaghetti Monsters - a bunch of festive holiday ones, mostly, but I also experimented with some other colors and holiday themes. Since I didn’t elaborate much on this in Sunday’s tutorial, I thought I might share some family snapshots to give y’all a better idea of how you might diversify your brood of FSMs.

First, those festive FSMs.

You can make a larger monster by twining two (or more) pipe cleaners together before assembling the monster. Or, you can birth a baby by cutting the pipe cleaners in half first. Here’s a “giant” monster I made, along with a wee little FSM:

It’s a little hard to see in that photo, but the giant FSM’s noodles are super-long and, well, kind of undulating and hypnotic:

I also gave her a set of extra-large googly eyes, and used faux cranberries for the soy balls; the cushy pom poms were just too small for this BBW.

Next, I experimented with different festive color combinations: gold and green, gold and red, red and green, green and silver, etc. Last year, I just used all the available pipe cleaner colors to make technicolored monsters, and ran out of poms before I could try anything more nuanced.

Here’s a little (*ahem*) taste:

You can also see that the eyes are positioned differently on each monster, and I varied the number of “balls,” depending on the size of the materials and how well (or not) they concealed the noodley mass in the center of the monster. I prefer the classic, double-ball look, myself.

Finally, I gave the plainer, non-sparkly chenille pipe cleaners and cotton pom poms a try. Of the soft chenille pipe cleaners, some I purchased at The Dollar Tree (e.g., the bright, multi-colored packages), while others are from Michael’s (e.g., the bags of red, black and muted multi-colored pipe cleaners; you can see my inventory here). As I worked with the different chenille cleaners, I could definitely detect a difference - the ones from Michael’s are of a higher quality, more soft and lush, but also stiffer and harder to bend and twist. They make a better-looking monster, but one that’s more difficult to make. In contrast, all the chenille cleaners, whether from The Dollar Tree or Michael’s, are a little stiffer than the festive, metallic ones.

In the end, I think I prefer the sparkly, festive Flying Spaghetti Monsters to the FSMas themed ones made with chenille cleaners:

She’s cute, but where’s the holiday spirit?

I also created a few monsters suitable for other holidays - black and orange for Halloween

and red, white and black for either Valentine’s Day or - better yet - International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

My favorite of the three is this one, probably because the shape of her eye stalks resembles a heart.

So cute!

Finally, for everyday use, I made a couple of plain, noodle-colored monsters: beige for pasta, and red for pasghetti sauce.

Like I said, a monster for every occasion!

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Tagged: holidays observances fsmas x-mas xmas christmas crifsmas pasta pirates fsm flying spaghetti monster Pastafarian Pastafarianism decorations decorating religion spoof religion parody religion science Intelligent Design creationism evolution global warming pipe cleaners pom poms cranberries googly eyes diy crafts crafting craft projects instructions flickr photos halloween valentine’s day v-day international talk like a pirate day talk like a pirate day

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 at 12:17 pm and is filed under FSMas, holidays & observances. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.