Crafted By Colette

Desert Bus 2019 ran for a record 162 hours – from 8am PST on Friday November 8th, to 2am PST on Friday November 15th.  And it was freaking awesome!

It was a week of chaos, music, dancing, hilarity, tiredness, emotions, crafted gorgeousness, comedy, nerdiness, and just general madness.  I tried to watch as much of it as possible, but I missed so much.  Thankfully a lot of it goes up on the YouTube channel, and I believe the VODs are still available on the Twitch channel.  The awesome Video Strike Team also have an extremely detailed spreadsheet listing each and every thing that happened, as well as a multitude of graphs and charts for all your nerdy queries.

This year I was one of the craft-along participants again.  My third year donating.  And after the hefty hefty blanket I made last year, I had decided to make something much smaller.  I made a set of four dragonscale dice bags, in the colours of the different shift banners.

Here’s the description I wrote to go with them.

This set of 4 stunning dragonscale* dice bags are fashioned in colours that represent the Desert Bus shift banners. They can hold around 150 dice (not included), or whatever knick knacks you need a little pouch for. Coins, gems, teeth, the eyeballs of your enemies. They are multi-purpose bags.

They were crocheted by hand with acrylic yarn and have toggle closures to keep your eyeballs/dice safe. Each bag stands about 5 and a half inches tall and has a diameter of approximately 4 or 5 inches.

*no Chromatic dragons were harmed in the making of these pouches.

They were offered as a giveaway – in which people can donate multiples of a certain amount of money to enter a sort of raffle – for donations of $7.20 or multiples thereof.  They raised a nice round $1664.

As ever, I was delighted and ecstatic and slightly overwhelmed.  It feels so good to be able to use these skills I have to help children all over the world.  I’m already thinking of ideas for next year.

For those who are curious, my good friend Sam at Sam’s Skunkworks made another spectacularly epic movie prop for the craft-along.  This year he made the ZF1 gun from The Fifth Element.

So far, props that he has donated have been offered as giveaways, and also as silent auctions – eBay style, where you can outbid someone over a period of 8 hours.  This year his donation was a live auction.  These are by the far the most exciting.  They last just a few minutes, and people in the Twitch chat can bid – auction house style.  It gets a little crazy.

This year Sam raised $6007.  That’s just crazy.  And I believe it brings his grand total up to a gajillion dollars.  He is a very talented man.  Go check him out.

Desert Bus is an amazing thing to be part of.  I highly recommend you go look it up, and join in the chaos next year.

This year they raised $864,415.01 – their highest yearly total yet.  Bringing their lifetime total raised for Child’s Play to more than SIX.  MILLION.  DOLLARS!  How freaking incredible is that?

If you need another reason to join the Desert Bus hype, here’s the poster for this year with some truly bizarre images that only make sense if you watch!  Or if you go to the interactive poster map on the VST site and click the links that appear when you hover over each image.

The poster this year – and every year – is drawn by the awesome M. Lee Lunsford who draws it as the stream progresses.  Watching the evolution is pretty fascinating – and the VST have you covered here as well.

Have I sold you on Desert Bus yet?