The Transistor from Supergiant Games’s Transistor

I fell in love with the man inside the Transistor. And now he is huggable, plush, and slightly floppy.

I’m a sucker for games with beautiful art, beautiful music, or a beautiful storyline. In just a few bittersweet hours, Transistor managed to hit all of these.

This project turned out to be a lot larger than intended (which seems to be a theme with my crafts). It was originally meant to be a mini version but ended up almost big enough for a shorter framed version of Red. I guess that kind of works out for me.

The Transistor is made of fleece (lots of fleece), foam (lots of foam), and love (I love you sword man).

The dimensions might be slightly off since I didn’t officially map anything out prior to drawing on everything. I mostly just guessed by assigning one length, and then determining the remaining measurements by doing a pixel-length ratio comparison off of a bunch of different images from Google. It seemed to have worked out alright.

The foam was cut pretty unceremoniously (and with decreasing patience per cut) with a tiny knife. That also seemed to have worked out alright.

A little rough around the edges but it would hopefully look passable with the cover in place. The foam sections are also sewn together; very loosely, but enough to keep it together.

When I started this project, I thought the sewing part would be the most fun, the foam construction being the more tedious. This was quickly disproved, as I slowly realized that almost everything I did for the Transistor, I had to do twice, to accommodate for both sides.

As I learned from my first attempt at cosplay, brown packaging paper is my best friend when it comes to pattern making – it’s easy to work with, you can wear it (not that I have), and it’s free (if you don’t count the cost of whatever item it came shipped with).

The faces of the Transistor were one of the more time consuming sections. Each detail was machined twice – once with straight stitch, then once over with zigzag stitch. It also didn’t help that the light blue details were relatively thin (and bunched up a lot while sewing) and that I can’t cut straight.

I ended up being bad and stopped taking pictures at this point (and forgetting to eat… I get excited working on new projects). But, with a lot of patient measuring, pinning, unintentional needle pricks (ow), machine sewing, machine troubleshooting, hand sewing, and hours of terrible posture… the Transistor started taking shape.

Sewing with a gigantic pile of fleece in your lap, at the beginning of an Arizona summer, is just as fun as you’d imagine.

Getting the foam into the cover was a nightmare. What I failed to realize was that the Transistor was made of foam, and foam will compress. The handle in particular, was a true nightmare. Even after aggressive coercing, the most I was able to get the foam in was about half the actual length of the handle…

I ended up abandoning the foam handle and just using regular stuffing. Slightly more floppy than originally intended, but I was pretty determined to finish this project with all soft materials (I was close to hiding a chopstick in there to get more structural integrity).

But, after about ~40hrs total of work… I became the proud owner of my own plush Transistor! Preview of what is to come for PAX Prime 2014 :D?

07/14/14 Update!

I caved and had to address the floppiness of the sword, especially in the handle. Apologies for not taking pictures, but hidden inside of the Transistor is now a long and thin dowel rod to at least keep the handle from flopping around.

Kind of wish I had documented it as I realized that attempting to shove a blunt wooden rod into a large foam sword is not very easy. I had to slowly whittle away at the rod with a small knife until it became a tiny spear, slowly bore a hole into the foam with my new spear, then cut off the sharp end before setting the rod inside the foam.

The handle was then re-stuffed by wrapping layers of craft batting around the dowel rod, instead of simply using regular stuffing.

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PATTERN CREATED BY ME!