The prototype
Last December, I started making a plushy version of everyone’s favourite crazy clump – the Katamari. To summarise the Katamari games in a few words, “you roll around a ball, picking up anything and everything in your way”.
The Katamari ball is basically a truncated icosahedron (fun fact, “truncated icosahedron” was briefly my nickname in year 5 as I was too nerdy to be a “square”). If you don’t know what a truncated icosahedron is, think of a soccer ball. In the Katamari, the faces that are pentagons become the knobbly nodes. To make my Katamari, I created a truncated icosahedron net based on one from Wikipedia, as my truncated icosahedron would exclude the pentagons.
The two net halves
After cutting out the two main sections of fabric, I started sewing furiously! It took most of the day, but I was able to sew together the nets, and add ten of the twelve knobs.
Me and my Katamari
After getting that far, I left it. I wanted to add magnets, but had none on hand. The Katamari went to the back of my mind, and I was lazy in finding where to get magnets from. Anyway, last Thursday, I finally ordered some magnets and have put them in the Katamari. The result is quite satisfying!
Tidying up in a messy way
The Katamari can hold the scissors pretty well! It takes two magnets to hold them quite firmly, but the weight of the scissors can make the Katamari tend to fall over. This might behave a bit better when I add the final two nodes. For objects that it has trouble holding onto with magnetic forces, the nodes are distributed fairly evenly over the surface, so objects can be balanced quite comfortably between them (as is the case with the box of staples in the image above). Objects can also be balanced on ones that are stuck on, like the brush. So there are a few ways to make the Katamari hold objects, and the overall effect is exactly what I was aiming for. The Katamari makes a great pincushion!
There is still some troubleshooting left to go. I will have to think about how to colour the Katamari – whether to use a variety of coloured materials, or to use fabric paints. I will likely have to glue the magnets to the insides of the nodes. And I will have to work out how to get the last two nodes onto the Katamari neatly. After I get those things sorted out, I’ll probably make a number of Katamari and maybe even some Team Fortress 2 Sticky Bombs.
