Yooniform! (The Making Of)

Phew! So, this time the Random Competition was to make your Team Hoodie for Yooyuball. Yooyuball is a major sport in Neopets, part of the Altador Cup Championships every year.

Most of you are still clueless, so I'll explain: The game play is very similar to Lacrosse, but uses a sling, much like the one in used in Jai Alai. It's pretty simplistic, but seriously addictive and highly competitive. There's 18 teams, and you select your favourite to play for - I've always been Darigan, for their devastating colourscheme mostly. It's served me well, because they're a very good team, coming in third last year. Currently we're ranked 6th, but there's still a couple of days left.

And the competitive attitude has rubbed off on the Random Competition entrants. So in true Darigan style, having been given three weeks, I went all out on this project.

The first few days I spent sourcing a great black and white material with 6cm stripes. I then learned how to use Machine Wash Dylon colours to stain my monochrome material into the wonderful deep violet and black required by my team. I studied guides and helpsheets on how to cut patterns, ordered a little sewing machine and made templates from newspaper.

Meanwhile, I also started stitching some old packing foam to give it the quilted look required for the sling, and got Rich to fish out his spraypaints.

After fighting with the sewing machine (it's been 10 years since I last used one, and this isn't a great one) I finally got the hang of it. I cut my pattern and set to. Multiple muckups and unpickings later, I surprised myself: I actually had something half decent.

I wore out two permanent markers drawing up the Darigan Citadel logo on heat transfer paper, in three different sizes. Huge for the back, medium for the breast and small for the bandanna. Well, TNT rules say you can't have your face showing.

The sling proved infinitely tricky. The base was easy enough, quilted style and sprayed red, it's very effective. The spikes, carved from a finer packing foam and then coated in black matt spray worked nicely too, once invisistiched onto the main body. The TRIM however was a real problem. (Not shown.) Pipe lagging doesn't like to be curled...