Commander Keen Bags

These guys are not as recognizable as pacman but they're super cute and the Commander Keen games behind them are lots of fun. They're not really arcade games, more of a run, jump and shoot at monsters kinda deal. All of the games feature a little boy named Billy Blaze, a super genius who travels to distant planets on his handmade rocket ship made out of bean cans and various scrap parts. The creatures that you see on the totes below are from the very first game in the series, Marooned on Mars. The aliens in that game include the green ones with one or two eyes that you see below, along with wolf man type creatures, venus flytrap things that can eat your character, a robot butler, and another robot thing that shoots at you. The back of the one eyed alien bag features some of the items that you can collect in the game to earn extra points. The pinkish thing on the top right is that venus flytrap thing I was talking about. These bags were a lot of fun to make though a bit time consuming. The time consuming part was tracing out the blocky aliens onto the totes. To do that I printed out enlarged pictures of the aliens, laid them against the totes, and traced out all of the lines with a pencil. I didn't cut out a stencil or anything like that, so to make these images I had to literally push hard on the paper with a pen and pencil and hope that most of the lines would show after I removed the paper. Parts did and parts didn't, so I'd say that about 65% was visible to me and the rest I had to draw by hand referring to the pictures. The results were definitely worth the effort though and these bags really are the kinds of unique accessories that get comments. For any craft to be successful I think that the key is to just try and make something that you really like. For me its all things colorful, cute and filled with patterns!

P.S. The blue thing that you see attached to the first bag was not handmade by me. It's just a blue star crayon key chain that I found and added to accessorize. :-)