Hobbies and Holidays: Getting Into Linoprinting

Wednesday, December 3rd 2025

Surprise blog post for today that's more journaling than update; I got into linocut / linoprinting last week! It's a fun art form where you carve a shape into a linoleum slab that you then coat in ink or paint to stamp onto a surface like paper or fabric. I've seen a lot of them on the internet recently, and it felt right up my alley. I've got some great ideas to spruce some of my clothes up with it...

Here's my first batch of stamps I carved! I made a set of three Chao heads from Sonic the Hedgehog, one for each alignment. With the little piece left on my first slab I also carved out a little Sonic head silhouette. I'm having a lot of fun with it! There was also a very conehead version of the dark chao but I was unsatisfied with him, so I made another stamp to replace it. I think it was the right call, haha!

I've had a chill November, thankfully. I've been deep cleaning the house and donating a lot of the clutter. I picked up a bunch of little sewing projects, like turning some old shirts into storage bags, repairing some clothes and making a new, longer strap for one of my purses. I scraped a couple of damaged stickers off of my sewing machine and added some new ones in their place. I chopped up the leftover fleece from the Tails Dolls projects and made a pair of Tails Doll tails! I'll have to figure out which page layout to use for that project at some point, depending on if I complete an outfit for a cosplay or just a few accessories for fun. Plenty of time to decide, though.

My online presence had an algorithm flashlight beamed on it, which has been... Interesting to observe. The footage I posted of the Tails Doll Puppet dancing blew up on Instagram! (We're talking like 250 000+ views... Usually my Tumblr posts get 15 notes!) I'm not used to the attention, and it's been entertaining to "test" the app's algorithm with other posts and see what makes Instagram tick... I'm excited that other people really vibed with his little dance as much as I had fun puppeteering him. The online hubbub is calming down thankfully, since I just sporadically post him when I happen to have a cute idea in mind. I've no desire to become a content creator to be honest, and seeing the weird toxic ways Instagram is trying to get me engaged in the grind is all the warnings I'll ever need to stay uninterested. (Though it's fun to peep the Insight page to see which parts of the world the Sonic.exe fandom is concentrated in.) I'm just happy he reached the right fandom for a brief moment, people as excited seeing an IRL Tails Doll moving as I was, and I'll probably keep posting him whenever I feel like it just like before, here or elsewhere, attention or not. I'm just happy sharing my things and curating my little corner of the web either way.

I went to my first UwUFest (their second edition) in late November and brought Tails Doll with me once again. I'm still surprised at just how much more fun a con can be when I'm not bogged down with a full costume. I find I really missed the experience of smaller cons... I love having a day to play mascot at our big convention of the year (where getting into panels or events is already a pain, anyways), but having something comfortable to just participate in all the activities is such a different kind of enjoyable. I also got to say hi to friends I hadn't seen in years! I brought a little tripod/phone-stick combo to make a little mock mini-vlog of Tails Doll and I had a lot of fun recording and editing it! Everyone was so nice about it, and after assembling everything I ended up with a cute little memento of the experience. It feels completely different from how I usually just have a few photos at cons of whatever I can manage to take with my hands full of costume, really. A bit more effort than I'm ready to do for a full three-day event, but it was fun to try it out!

Now that December and the Holidays are rolling in, I'm slowing down on crafts again for a little bit. It's a busy season with a lot of things planned on my end to keep track of, but I do have one little con-related event I'm looking forward to: I'll be hosting my first group photoshoot this weekend and I can't wait! I've been wanting to plan out fandom events for a little while now (pretty sure I mentionned in back in the Otakuthon blog post), so I'm super excited to jump in with this first step. Let's hope it goes well!