But manuals I come with clearly read "I cut"

Anduin is called to the Dragon Isles to help an old friend. A journey about soup, love, and moving forward.

Wranduin Big Bang Zine 💥

I ran a little server event for our Wranduin discord, and as a result after months of work we somehow ended up with 200 pages of art and story ✍️ We are releasing it as a free pdf download for public so come get your Wranduin fix in many flavors!

We had 7 writers and 8 artists working on this project, and we have stories ranging from wholesome fluff, to angst, to smut. Everything tagged and organized accordingly.

Be sure to also visit our Ao3 collection to see all our posted work there and leave kudos and comments and love for every creator! And a special mention for our cover artist @claret-ash who made our zine look so beautiful and shiny.

recently saw this screenshot in the wild and lost my mind because i knew it wasnt supposed to say girl. its ladykins. its get off the cross ladykins. i know this because ladykins is not something my brain could make up and i remember ladykins. and i was sincerely wondering if someone put in the work to censor ladykins for some inscrutable purposes but then i looked it up and

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.

Himalayan Monal (Lophophorus impejanus), male, family Phasianidae, order Galliformes, northern India

fixing the lack of gracerocky fics with uuuuuh,,, coffee shop au

WHITE WINE

if you want to make a wine person very unhappy, say that a white wine they like "is giving me a little green bell pepper?"

RED WINE

honestly the only two questions you need to start credibly talking about red wine are "does it taste like red fruits (strawberry/cherry/raspberry) or black fruits (blackberry/plum)?" and "does it taste oaky (i.e. gently sweet and earthy in a way youd associate with coffee or chocolate or warming spices)

if its a fancy dry wine (not a dessert wine, not port, manischewitz or markovic) dont say "sweet," say "juicy"

FIZZY WINE

if its red and fizzy its probably a lambrusco

if youre drinking champagne talk about the "minerality," even chalk notes if youre feeling gutsy. you dont have to taste it just say it

ORANGE WINE

this is very trendy. youre gonna want to talk about its "funkiness." if you use the term "gym socks" at the right time you will get a round of laughs or at least knowing nods. if you see shmutz in the bottom dont worry about it.

MISC