Spelled The Way It Sounds

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Knitting finished as of last night! Still need to weave in a few ends, wash, and block.

Thank you so much for all the nice things everyone has said about this blanket! Unfortunately, I do not have a pattern, so much as I have several patterns and some back-of-the-napkin style math notes that won’t make sense to anyone but me - but I do have a picture of this planning piece (since frogged to reuse the yarn in the blanket itself.)

As a few people in the notes pointed out, the dragon pattern is Tahesha the Dragoness by Ina Wendrock

But it's on a plain reverse stockinette background, and I wanted this as part of a complex cable afghan. It's going to be a wedding gift for two friends in my DnD group, so I knew I wanted it big enough that two people could reasonably share it while watching TV together on a couch, and for a dragon to still be visible when folded and draped over the back of a couch or chair, in case that's how they store it. So I knew I was committing myself to knitting 5 dragons (one in the center and one in each of the four corners), and figuring out myself how to plop the dragon in to a larger cable blanket pattern.

Back in November, I bought the dragon pattern and knit a test version of it so I could see how it worked and measure the dimensions. (You can see from the curled up edges that I did this before I found the part in the pattern notes where Ina Wendrock helpfully informs us that the dragon is knit over 45 initial stitches, to help us add it to our own projects, but ah well.) Then I started trying to figure out the other cables.

I knew I wanted some traditional cables so that it had an heirloom look to it (but with dragons), but I thought that the dragons would look too out of place if everything else looked copy-pasted from a classic fisherman’s sweater. Fortunately, there are a number of knitting designers right now doing cool things with trying to make cables that resemble Celtic knot motifs, so I went to the public library and borrowed a bunch of cable knitting books and started bookmarking what I liked. My favorite patterns were all coming from this book:

Which looks like it's out of print now, but wasn't in December and I was able to ask for and receive it for Christmas. (Designer Melissa Leapman's ravelry store is here in case anyone wants to check it out):

I narrowed my bookmarked cables down to patterns that had 1) an odd number of stitches; 2) a central "crossover" cable in multiple parts of the pattern so that I could "open" it up to create the medallions that the dragons would sit in; and 3) a stitchcount of less than 45, by enough that I'd have room to drop a traditional cable on either side. My favorite two would then be the center cables for the central dragon panel and the left & right dragon panels (when I wasn't doing the dragons), and then I decided on a very simple c4b twist between the panels and a tight 5-rib cable braid on the edges. I loved the first two patterns from the book that I tested and didn't have to try any of my runner-up bookmarks - but if you zoom in on the picture, you can see that for the traditional cables around the Melissa Leapman cable for the center panel, I tried and discarded a honeycomb cable and an Xs and Os variant before deciding on the one that I'm not actually sure of the name of that made it into the final pattern. For the side panels, I had thought it might be nice to incorporate a hearts cable since it was for a wedding blanket. I'm not sure how traditional these heart cables are, but I've seen them unattributed in more than one published pattern from different sources, and they're published in a number of cable pattern guides online. They worked next to the Melissa Leapman cable I wanted for the side panels, so they went in the pattern without me trying anything else.

While practicing the dragon cable, I had noticed that many of the cables started with an increase, so on the back of one of my chart print-outs, I graphed a rough plan for what I had decided to put where in terms of the traditional and Leapman cables that would go around the dragons, and numbered out the stitches if I worked the first cables in each pattern as increases instead of cables to mimic the start of the dragons. Then I added up the total number of stitches and cast on, and it worked surprisingly well! After completing one repeat of the side-panel central cables, I started "opening" up the circles where the dragon would be through improvisation (the left and right panels that were parallel always matched each other because I was doing the same thing in each row - other than that, I wound up doing it slightly differently every time, and that was ok. They look the same enough.)

I had planned to either leave it un-bordered or add the full mitered border that Ina Wendrock (who designed the dragon pattern) has on her store depending on how it worked up, but after I'd knit enough to see what it looked like, I decided that the mitered border was overkill, but it did need something, so when I finally got to the end I did an I-chord bind-off and then went back and picked up stitches along the cast-on to do an I-chord bind-off there too. If I had it to do over again, I might have done a folded hem on each side instead, but we'll see how the I-chord blocks.

So, that's how you make the dragon blanket. Either get the patterns I mentioned and try to duplicate, or just buy the dragon and add your favorite cables for the rest!

[Sorry I'm not more help, but I cannot stress enough - I did not write any of this down as I went.]

It’s blocked! The dragons came out so nicely after blocking, and you can see the hearts better.

Surely Grace inadvertently causes a craft revolution on Erid when it's realized that he's going to need new clothes sooner or later. He gets to explain different colors to Eridians and they recreate his fox cardigan, but more cozy and with stone inlays so he makes noise when he walks. He's also regained some weight since getting to Erid but they want to make sure he's nice and cushioned and warm, so they create matching pants, too, that mimic the coloring on a fox's legs. They have many thrums about this and different crafting groups fight for which articles of clothing they get to make Savior Grace. They create different synthetic fibers to mimic fur and wool and everything :)

hi hello. look at stratt and how expressive she is even without words. are you looking? look at her. theres so much emotion in every detail of her face.

Bluey - The Claw Season 1, Episode 19 Air Date: 19 October 2018

Fat Horse No. 17

It’s the year of the horse and I’ve always been a horse girl at heart, so I’m finally taking advantage of the excuse to fill the world with fat little horses! These felted friends are about the size (and shape!) of an apple, and if you happen to have any apples to share I’m sure they’d help you out! On the other end of the spectrum from the luxuriously long mane and tail, I wanted to try a classically decorated Percheron with the tied up bob tail.

Like much of the world, this week we are going to be experiencing an intense heat wave.

If you dont have access to strong enough AC, please find your local cooling centers! Many libraries double as cooling centers, but not all of them.

Here's a WWLP article that lists some cooling centers open during this particular heat wave, and heres 413Cares a website thats been collecting cooling and warming centers for years. Use another resource to make sure those locations are acting as cooling centers for this particular heat wave.

Museums also tend to have very, very good AC to keep their items safe, and all the five colleges' museums are free and open to the public.

Grocery stores are typically kept extra cold to make you hungry so you buy more.

For many of us, the water out of our tap comes out very cold. Hold your wrists veins-side-up under the water for a while to cool down your entire body.

Personal fans, ice water wraps around your neck, and sticking your feet in ice water can go a long way for beating the heat.

Swamp coolers/evaporative coolers work well in lower levels of humidity, but can be dangerous at higher levels of humidity. They raise the humidity in your own space, which makes your sweat significantly less effective. They are easy to DIY with a fan and materials you probably already have. Check your local humidity forecast daily before using them, and just use a fan when its too humid. I wouldnt use a swamp cooler in any of the orange temperatures on this chart, and I'd be really careful about using one in any of the yellow parts of the chart.