Third time’s the charm

robot icon from Firefox When you automate Firefox, a little robot icon shows up in the address bar to let you know the browser is being controlled by software. I love browser automation and that charming robot and wanted to be able to show off my affection to the world with a keychain version. A deep dive into the Mozilla gecko-dev git repository found the icon file, and three attempts at representing it in fiber gave me the keychain I wanted.

three attempts at the robot

First I thought I could make a crochet version, with perle cotton in the appropriate colors, but it was obvious early on that it wasn’t going to have the effect I wanted and I only half-finished it. For my second attempt I turned to needle-felting, buying 100% non-superwash wool yarn for the body color, and got along well until the end, when it was pointed out by my husband that the proportions were off enough that adding the red arms/ears/fins was not going to go well. For the third attempt I bought 100% wool flat felt and rolled up a strip of it to form the core, so I would have more control over the proportions, and that time it all went swimmingly!

needle-felted Firefox robot icon needle-felted robot with source icon

(So it’s a little lopsy-faced. I’m okay with that.)

Note: This robot is not one of Mozilla’s trademarks, but the icon file is subject to the Mozilla Public License.

3 thoughts on “Third time’s the charm”

    1. Thanks! Yeah, I thought the crochet was a shoe-in, and maybe if I could have stitched it tighter it would have worked – but with the total lack of give to the thread there was no way.

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