#wips2019

VAMPIRE BLANKET

This baby probably deserves a post of its own - I've been meaning to introduce you for a while now, but I'm sorry to say it's been put away (in Torpor?) for about a year.

For the past five years or so I've been part of a very long-running roleplay campaign of Vampire: The Masquerade. You may have heard of it - it's recently been re-released and updated to be slightly less unashamedly Nineties, which is great, but as the rest of my group are Gen Xers I've developed a weird nostalgia for a time period I wasn't entirely aware of at the time.

Though it has been quite fun to remind everyone else of how old they are...

"Oh, 1995? You were finishing high school? I think I joined the local pre-school in 1995! Yeah, they let me in early because I was potty trained."

Good times.

Anyway, the first square of this blanket was cast on just over two years ago, a few hours after getting back from a weekend-long music festival. I hadn't eaten anything but chips and Nandos in four days, I'd been kept awake by music until the early hours, and I'd had to wake up and pack at a ridiculous time in the morning to get home. I hadn't had breakfast. I was running on adrenaline and bad ideas. I should have had a nap.

I decided to learn Double Knitting instead.

Each square is the emblem of a Vampire clan, and is knit holding a colour in each hand. I generate the patterns from Stitch Wizard with occasional tweaks to fix odd stitches.

TUNISIAN BLANKET

In my old knitting group there was a bit of a running joke that blankets are contagious. I can't remember exactly how it started - one or two people stated crafting a blanket, cursing its size, bemoaning the cost of the yarn, then finally taking months to sew it all together while complaining about the seams the entire time. If you'd listened to them it would be a perfectly natural conclusion to come to that crafting blankets was a bad, boring, costly idea and there was no point in doing it.

And yet...

Blankets started appearing. People with plenty else to do started committing themselves to long, time consuming blankets. Running out of yarn was a regular occurrence. It was a common thing that people were only doing it 'to use up their scraps' and then having to beg, borrow or buy twice as much yarn as they had already. Crafting would happen between sessions. Seaming would not.

One by one the group fell to the great Blanket Plague. All except me.

I was not going to knit a blanket. I'd already made one and learnt my lesson, and didn't really like the stretch that knitting tended to have for a blanket. I was not going to knit a blanket. I was not.

Then I moved away. For about a month Jojo and I waited for the internet to be connected to our new home. It was a dangerous time, especially as we were right around the corner from the cheapest yarn store in town. We sat in silence. We read books. We watched about five seasons of The Simpsons back-to-back. And in that silent, desperate time I taught myself to crochet.

I cast on a blanket 'for practise'.

Specifically it was Tunisian crochet, otherwise known as Afghan crochet because it used to be popular with the Victorians for making afghans, particularly as the resulting material was good for cross stitch and embroidery. I was, if you excuse the pun, hooked.

This is mostly finished. Honestly, if I hadn't had Jojo complaining about it taking up too much of the living room floor I'm not sure I would have gotten around to sewing any of it together. When I moved in with HM and The Panther this was put to one side, mostly due to The Panther's affinity for throwing up on things he really likes.

GREEN JUMPER

I’ve taught a lot of people to knit. For many years I was the unofficial-but-designated teacher of my uni knitting group and I have taught the hopeless, the desperate, and the easily distracted.

I have also taught the frighteningly dedicated.

There’s one student I remember in particular. I can’t remember whether I taught him the basics or just helped him with a little bit extra, but I do know that two years after welcoming him into the group he was knitting cable jumpers in a week, dyeing and spinning his own sock yarn, and eventually moved to New Zealand to live on an alpaca farm.

Talk about a slippery slope…

There may have been a chance - a slight teensy chance - that I, at one point, was slightly envious of this fellow. Something about seeing someone you consider to be a newbie far surpass you in skill in a short amount of time can be perturbing, and I was not a fan of being perturbed.

One day he came in wearing a new sweater he’d just finished. It was lovely, knit with pure wool in a warm brown yarn with an interesting yet masculine zig-zag cable pattern on the front. I loved it. I wanted it. I had to make it.

I cast on in this green yarn and diligently knit a whole ten inches or so before coming to terms with the fact that it was never going to fit me, and for the love of Zimmerman why did I not knit a gauge swatch this happens every time etc. etc….

The yarn went in my bin of shame. I felt bad for feeling threatened by my friend’s amazing talent, and instead consoled myself that there was no harm in being outshone by someone with so much love and passion for something I cared about. We were, after all, on the same team, and he’d never have managed to knit that jumper without my teaching. So that was kind of a win by proxy, right?

Some weeks later he brought the jumper to the knitting group and handed it to me.

“It doesn’t fit,” he explained sheepishly, “I made it a size too small. But it fits you - do you want it?”

STRIPEY JUMPER

Alright, serious talk for a moment - I don’t make many sweaters. I have done previously, but it all sort of stopped around four or five years ago… right when I realised I was trans.

Knitted jumpers were not my friends, at least not until I got the proper hang of binding. The stretch of fabric over my chest felt way to obvious, so I never wore a knitted jumper, so I never made them.

This jumper was going to be the exception. In a fit of particular body confidence and love for pretty yarn I cast this on, determined that this would buck the trend and I’d be happy and confident enough to wear knitwear properly again.

In fact, the fit of body confidence was so strong that I didn’t even pause to look up a tutorial on how to knit a top-down raglan jumper.

I have done so now. I did it right after I separated the yarn for the body and arms as I was growing increasingly alarmed at how terrible the neckline looked. I looked it up, ascertained I’d probably done it irreparably wrong, then went “meh, I’m sure it’ll be fine…” and kept knitting anyway.

Obviously I eventually lost impetus to knit this disaster.

I know we've got a bit of a love/hate thing going on with Marie Kondo right now, but you've got to admit she talks sense at least sometimes. Namely:

If you have something you are never going to use, give it to someone who will appreciate it.

If you love something, make it accessible.

Last year I was mostly using my sock yarn and some odds and ends of DK and 4-ply. That's fine - both of these things are stored under my bed for easy access. But everything else is either strewn around my room in various bags and boxes, or locked away in the corner of the room where it's a pain to reach. How am I supposed to get joy out of stash diving if I have to shift a couple of bags every time I want to impulsively cast on an ill-advised disaster?

I started by gathering everything together.

I then continued by immediately regretting my decision.

This isn’t even the stuff I keep at Mum’s house. That’s a whole separate issue.

My first pass was for choosing what to keep. It wasn’t exactly a case of ‘what sparks joy’ - more, what do I actively not want to knit with?

Everything I kept went in the box.

Everything I didn’t keep went either in the bag for the charity shop -

- Or on the window sill for some nice pictures to see if I can find it a new home.

That was mostly for good-ish stuff I’d bought in a fit of fancy but knew I would never be able to give a good chance to. Take the above yarn for example. I remember buying this in my first year of university. We’d gone to the annual Knitting & Stitching Show in Harrogate, and I was completely overwhelmed. I’d never been anywhere yarny other than a wee village wool shop before, and my birthday had been either the week or fortnight before so I had money burning through my young, innocent pocket.

I was determined to buy something for a fancy wrap or a sweater (I had no idea how much yarn is in a sweater), and for some reason I settled on this.

It sort of made sense; I really liked green and blue, and I thought the sparkles would be a... umm... conversation point. Now I am older and wiser, I still really like green and blue, but have also come to terms with the fact that the shades of green and blue which suit me and the rest of my wardrobe are somewhat more... muted than this.

So now I will thank it for being patient with me, and find it someone who’ll love it more.

The charity shop bag was not thanked as thoroughly, I’ll admit. That was mostly full of odds and ends of DK that elderly relatives had ‘gifted’ me because the colour was an affront to whatever divine being invented the rainbow. While I do like to keep a broad range of colours for experimentation, I basically judged ‘would I consider it a waste of nicer colours if I knit something to use this up?’

After that was done everything got tipped out again to decide where it should live. The sock yarn went back in the box under my bed - unsurprisingly, none of the sock yarn got culled.

The odds and bods that I keep for touches of colour were emptied out and sorted through. All the 4-ply is now co-habiting with the sock yarn in a separate bag, all the useless bits are in my stuffing box, and all the DK was put in the newly-freed DK bag!

Big balls are left loose, anything that can tangle easily is split by warm/cold tone and kept in a bag with other tiny strays.

Everything else went back in the crate - including the cardboard box of Aran yarn I’ve had sitting on my shelf for about a year.

The only exceptions to this are the things I removed for ongoing projects. All projects were stuck in a pile (that’s next week’s job), and any yarn I came across that was to be used with that exact project was stuck in the pile with it. There’s no point in keeping a spare ball of something underneath a huge pile of everything else, and keeping it in one place might encourage me to finish them.

D20

I have this weird fondness for building geometry.

Several times in my school life I remember having to build cubes - did anyone else do this? You started with a net grid on some card, you cut it out, someone inevitably cuts the tabs off so it won’t stick together, then you make a few folds and apply some glue and voila! You’ve made a cube, or a die for a game you designed, or a small box for a Mother’s Day present, or the body of a cardboard car, or…

I loved those. I loved the nets, like someone had ripped the shape open in just the right places and stamped it out over card. In middle school we moved on to bigger shapes, like octahedrons, dodecahedrons, and of course, icosahedrons.

This might be partly why I like roleplaying games. So many interesting 3D polygons to play with…

CHUNKY JUMPER

I would like you to imagine, if you can, what it looks like when Heaven and Hell meet. Penance and Pleasure in one place, one fixed image of never-ending joy and anguish. I have seen this place. That place is where this yarn comes from.

There’s a craft fair I used to visit every November with my knitting group - the Harrogate Knitting & Stitching show - which takes up four or five exhibition rooms of this grand old theatre right in the middle of the quaint, historic Yorkshire town.

And in almost every room, there’s a clearance pile.

A huge pile right in the middle of the room, about 4 yards across in each direction and piled waist high, all of it full or partial bags of batches of wholesale yarn marked down to painfully reasonable prices.

I’ve seen old ladies shove each other aside over that pile. Luckily, us being young, nimble, and having the advantage of group cohesion, we would tend to get adventurous. Normally the tallest member of the group would clamber to the middle of the pile and filter through the truly awful (pastel orange mohair, no thank you), then pass back via human chain to the rest of the group when they came across something good. If no one wanted it we’d move it to the edge of the pile for the scavengers.

(Survival of the Knittest, perhaps?)

This yarn and the green yarn featured tomorrow were both acquired hunting through this clearance pile. I don’t usually knit with chunky as it weirdly hurts my hands too much, but I’ve always wanted to make something cozy out of this. I’d hoped for a hoodie but I doubt I’ll have enough - maybe some kind of a body-warmer or a gilet?