Sunshine on a Cloudy Day

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.

in most every society and economy, children have no rights to bodily autonomy. a child must be educated in their body and their rights to it to know that their body is being abused by a parent or family member. they must know how to speak about it to report it. they must TRUST someone to do so.

that person must then trust their report. then intervene. the family must believe the victim - and more importantly, they must care. they must care enough to remove the abuser and block contact with them.

this is difficult if they are financially or physically or otherwise reliant on the abuser

the abuse must not be normalised in the family. they must have resources to call on. education to engage with. there must be help available for them to ask for. everyone must care.

for all of the above, people have to be able to talk about it. express it. discuss it. and yes, make art about it.

all these pressure groups are always concerned with western family values, and "family values" say "protect the children", but the people who are meant to "protect" those children are typically the patriarchs and matriarchs who supposedly do so by having absolute power and control over those kids

when family matters above all, when the priority is always to "keep the family together", "protect the family unit", when protecting kids is thought of in the same breath as keeping them together with their parents or grandparents or other blood connections, what do you do when those people abuse?

and don't get me wrong, the reason that giving those kids over to the state is because the state will also allow those children to be abused. many foster parents are abusers, and children's homes and young offenders' wings and other institutes are rife with abusers. you're just not related to them.

no matter where kids go, they don't have rights. their words aren't respected. they're treated as talking points and possessions to be passed around at will - they have no agency, no autonomy, to the point that a child WANTING autonomy or agency is literally treated as a joke

god forbid any of us talk about that. the world would fucking crumble if we started talking about incest and incestuous abuse as a pillar of our society, constant and continuous, committed by parents and grandparents, siblings, loved ones, and not by some stranger danger creepy distant uncle

atheist bad driver: I will rely on my own skill to see myself safely home after a mere 8 drinks

My favorite example is Terraria vs Minecraft. Minecraft is a game that hates you. If you customize your experience at all it turns off achievements. Eg. I like to turn off drop items on death, I find it tedious in the extreme. But, it means no achievements. Terraria is a game that loves you, it lets you choose whatever settings you want and you can get all but the difficulty based achievements.

i've been playing an incremental game called Orb of Creation lately, and it's a game that loves you, for the most part. when you have a tooltip up, you can hit "T" to lock that tooltip in place so you can mouseover the tooltip and see more details or explanations about everything in it. Something says it offers a benefit to "arcanist" abilities? Freeze tooltip, mouse over "arcanist", and see a list of example abilities that are affected. Not sure why you're gaining or losing a resource? Click on the resource and get a detailed list of where it's coming from and where it's going and why.

It's not perfect, but it's very good and it is just such a delight compared to a lot of incrementals.

stupid shitty grace rocky pride comic