1up

Important to keep the chill off your electrical goods I feel. If anyone is wondering what happened to the recycled bit of green embroidery thread I was wittering on about in the previous post, here it is! On a sock for my niece's ipod. I ummed and ahhed about music based motifs for a while, but couldn't think of anything really suitable. You could maybe embroider a big treble clef on or something but then it would look like a bad 80s nightclub. And there's not enough space on it to do anything too fancy. Whereas a 16x16 pixel image from the world of retro gaming fits perfectly. Anyway, you can play games on ipods can't you, and my niece likes Mario Kart. So a 1up mushroom it is.

I dug out some ancient 4ply sock yarn, knitted a 40-stitch stocking stitch tube, and cross stitched the mushroom over the top. I used to make loads of this sort of thing but haven't done it for a while - it's great fun! Only took a couple of days, so she may even get it in time for her birthday. The finished sock is modelled on a chocolate bar which is going in the post with it. (Yes, i did spend ages in the shop, looking at all the chocolate bars from various angles like a stoner, trying to find one which was the same dimensions as an ipod. This one was closest!)
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pacman dungarees

So I finished my first evah sewing pattern!!1!1 How exciting. It is Burda 9652, picked because it claimed to be Very Easy. I wouldn't quite go that far, as I don't really have much experience of this sort of thing, but I seem to have got through it ok. There were some sentences I had to read several times, particularly during late night beer assisted sewing sessions, but generally it was pretty straightforward.

Drunk on the excitement of actually finding the pattern comprehensible, and possibly the aforementioned beer, I may have got sliiiightly carried away with the applique there.
Pacman is being chased by Inky on the back. On the front are some bonus cherries. (I originally fancied an apple or a strawberry, but they would have been trickier, and Mr. Rubbishknitter didn't believe me that you ever got these as bonuses. Obviously because he wasn't as awesome a player as I was). It seemed important at the time for my son to fully appreciate the marvels of the 8 bit era of computer gaming. I started by copying the original pacman sprites onto graph paper. Being incredibly anal I like representations of classic video games to be pixel perfect, and I even toyed with the idea of cutting the characters out with blocky edges, but I doubt I would have been able to get it neat enough, so I rounded out the edges of each original sprite for a slightly cuddlier effect. There are much more suitable ways of representing pixels accurately in the world of textiles - cross stitch, crochet, knitting - so I thought it might work better just to do something simpler.

I made the appliques using bits of scrap fabric. Using a double thickness of each, I drew round my graph paper templates and machine stitched them together nearly all the way round. I trimmed the edges, turned them inside out and hand-slipstitched them onto the pocket pieces. I know this is probably a weird way to do applique. But the scraps of fabric were cheap and flimsy, and after some earlier flirtations I'm now getting a bit bored of zigzag stitch. My previous rubbish attempts at applique have been a bit fally-aparty after a couple of washes. Crapplique, if you will. As this garment is for a child who likes to drag himself around the floor all day, pausing occasionally to dribble chewed up biscuit or throw up on himself, it was imperative that they withstand a few machine washes. So for the teeny tiny details, like Inky's eyes and the cherry stalks, I hand embroidered them on. Yes, it took a while, but it was damn good fun, and each pocket made a pleasingly portable project for sitting in the sun with.

I put buttons at the top instead of poppers because I thought they might hold up to a bit more bouncing around. The other major modification I did was to put poppers along the inside leg seams for ease of nappy changing. I bought a pair of baby dungarees recently from a high street shop, marvelling at the cheapness, then was horrified to realise i had to wrestle the child all the way out of and back into them every time he relieved himself. So this time, poppers it had to be. In the past, I have always used those ones that you have to hand sew on, and the way I attach them they generally fall off quite regularly, causing the air around me to turn blue. This time, this time I would conquer the art of the reclosable seam. I was highly enthused by the idea of popper tape, but could only find it available in white, which would have looked a bit weird on such dark fabric. Dying it could have been an answer but I spotted some dark brown bias binding in the exact right shade in my local fabric shop so opted for making my own using this and a pack of hammerable innable poppers. This turned out to be quite a learning experience. I learnt the following things, which may be useful to others:

• At all costs, avoid wielding the hammer too close to your fingers. shudder


• You should, however, avoid concentrating on finger avoidance so hard that you fail to notice you have hammered in 4 poppers in a row upside down.


• Do not hammer on a pine table. You will leave little popper-shaped impressions. Also when you hammer the table, the loose poppers that are lying around on it are liable to jump off in fear.


• Avoid making popper tape out of a single thickness of bias binding or other flimsy fabric. You need to put some heavy duty interfacing behind it before putting the poppers in. Otherwise, your first attempt to open your nice new popper tape will be greeted with a rrrRRRIP! noise that may make you cry.


• I tried a couple of types but the Prym ones were the best - sturdier, more difficult to accidentally hammer in upside down if you are being a bit stupid, and, crucially, slightly shinier.


• Maybe not a good idea to try and machine sew over poppers.

So after several popperfails, I am pleased to report the end result is sturdy and easily openable. Phew!

To verify the general sturdiness, here's a few action shots of the dungarees, as modelled by rubbishknitterjunior. I think he likes them.


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no gorillas allowed

*sings*

love is in the air... everywhere i look around...

This is my valentines day effort, just finished. I think I'm fairly safe to post it here as I doubt the intended recipient will be perusing the knitting blogosphere any time soon. It's based on the end of level scene in Donkey Kong - when Mario climbs up onto the top girder you get this tender little moment. Purists will note that the Lady isn't wearing high heels in my version - I wanted the figures to be roughly the same size, and I'm more of a trainers girl myself.

I'm no cross-stitch expert but it seemed the best way of compressing a small pixellated scene from the 8 bit era into a card-sized space, so this is the medium I have opted for.


It was inspired by recently watching King of Kong, a documentary about the mad competitiveness of people trying to get the high score in Donkey Kong. Really far, far better than it sounds... it made me go on a small retro games bender. Equally pleasing, and even funnier was the South Park pisstake of it, which was on last night as I was stitching the Lady's skirt. Best not to go into details of that one in case anyone is eating or drinking as they read this, but suffice it to say that it was utter genius, in a fairly stomach-churningly unpleasant sort of way.



The inside of the card. You probably have to have seen the end of level scene in Donkey Kong to fully appreciate this. If you haven't, I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to reveal that the the titular gorilla has something of an irritating habit of repeatedly spoiling Mario and the Lady's romantic liaisons.

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mario madness

It's another DS sock - for my nephew for Christmas. Hark at the lovely Mario in all his marvellous 8 bit Super Nintendo glory.

Duplicate stitched on after doing a basic stocking stitch tube, whilst drooling in front of 'the life of birds' on sunday, finishing with a 3 needle bind off. I copied off this image:

If only the pixellated heroes of today were so easily reproduced in knitwear. I would love to immortalise the protagonists of 'guitar hero 2' on the playstation in wool, but i fear Lars Umlaut is too high-resolution for my skills. Sigh.


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Donkey Kong DS sock

Due to popular demand after the success of the shroom, I made another DS sock for my fella. This one has Donkey Kong's head cross-stitched on. I've never attempted embroidery before so don't laugh. But it looks a bit more blocky and pixel-like than the intarsia attempt, which i feel is more fitting with the general theme. And it was probably a little bit easier. I think. Less tangly-thready anyway, cos you can just do one colour at a time for the monkey bit.



















This is the image i used for the embroidery. You could only really fit a 16 pixel wide image onto my DS-sized piece of knitting otherwise i might have gone crazy and put the whole monkey on, limbs and all. I used scrap yarn for the whole thing. The gauge of the main yarn used is somewhere between double knitting and aran weight.

How to make one, knitfaced style

• cast on 40 stitches of background colour wool, using 4mm dpns


• join and knit stocking stitch tube, whilst drooling in front of telly


• when DS fits snugly in tube, do 3 needle bind off to seal one end


• find even more scrappy bits of wool in appropriate colours


• cross stitch piccie on, using one cross stitch across each knit stitch


• tie off ends of embroidery wool in half-arsed knots on the other side

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Mario mushroom DS sock

I love my DS and don't want it to get scratched... so i made it this sock... out of supercheap 99p-a-ball unspecified fibre from the bargain bin and leftover scraps (all about DK thickness). The image is the old skool 16x16 pixel version. It's just a stocking stitch rectangle sewn down two sides with a bit of intarsia (the other side is a bit messy, but i feel life is too short to worry about such things)

this is roughly how i did it:

a) Knit small swatch of background colour yarn. DK weight is the ideal gauge to fit the mushroom on one side.
b) Measure no of stitches in 5 cm of swatch.
c) Measure long side of DS in cm
d) cast on number of stitches = (b x c)/5. I added a couple of stitches to this for luck so the DS fits in snugly.
e) Knit about 10 rows of background colour in stocking stitch (as a flat piece, not in the round).
f) For the intarsia - i used scraps of old wool and i think this was easier than using big bits that are attached to balls as they get less tangled - you can sort of shake the ends loose. I twisted the yarns together whenever i added a new colour. For the bits where the new colour was only one stitch, eg. the eyes and the edge of the face, i stranded the old colour over. The rest of the time it was easier to pick up another scrap of yarn.

This is the chart i used.

g) Knit the other side in background colour in stocking stitch, until edges meet when wrapped round DS
h) Cast off and sew up long edge and short edge

i can recommend trying it, if anyone is tempted, as it only took one day to do (when fitted in around other activities, rather than 24 hours solid knitting!). And its pretty handy!

Now I can throw it in my bag wherever i'm going, with barely a second thought for its safety. Ideal for Pub Mario kart sessions!!
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