Thursday, July 9, 2015

Sick!

 I love Big Hero 6. It's like Kidzbop, only instead of being sung by kids for kids, it's made by nerds, about nerds, for nerds. (It's also much less annoying than Kidzbop.) Sadly, I seem to be rather alone in this. Hiro and Baymax cannot compete with Elsa and Anna for the hearts of the Disney fanbase. This means that while the average knitting Disney fan was spoiled by the sheer amount of patterns for Anna and Elsa dolls, Kristoff dolls, Olaf dolls, Kristoff hats, Hans dolls, Anna sweaters, Elsa sweaters, and Sven stuffies, they were terribly disappointed by the sad lack of patterns for anything related to Big Hero 6. Since I am the average knitting Disney fan, this was a hard thing to swallow. So I did what I love/hate to do: I designed a pattern!
 When one is the senior knitter of Nerd Club, one ends up knitting all sorts of stuff for one's friends that no designer in their right mind would write a pattern for. This includes, but is not limited to....

A blue-chicken Pokemon


















Gauntlets in the style of Garnet from Steven Universe


and a Magikarp hat.













Engineering such projects is fun, but it can also be extremely frustrating and draining, especially when the dumb blue chicken's bum is so fluffy you can't see your stitches, or when the gauntlets are too tight and have to be ripped out, or when the little pink things on the knuckles look so wrong you don't know how you'll ever fix them. After each project, I promised to never do that again... at least for a while. And since it had been "a while," I studied Baymax's armor and drew up a sock that I thought resembled it, at least a little. (Knitting a stuffed Baymax would have been supremely annoying, because he is round and his head is not pointy, plus I wanted something more subtle that I could wear every day.)

















Now that I had designed a sock that I liked, the only thing remaining was to knit it. Easy, right? *laughs maniacally* I even had the perfect yarn: Regia "Hand-Dye Effect" Design Line Kaffe Fassett. That yarn was a gift, believe it or not, from my mom's and my friend Mrs. Betsy in New York. She found a whole bunch of amazing sock yarn, packed it into a Ziploc bag, and sent it to me, It was like Christmas during school!
 Anyways, the sock-knitting process was a long haul. The first sock was ripped out about four times and languished for months after the single-ply yarn decided to test my sanity by forming an enormous knot involving what seemed like a quarter of the skein. The second sock was cast on and knit to the leg before I realized it was short about twenty stitches. Since I don't have a leg with the circumference of a remote control, I ripped it out and cast on again.
 But these setbacks made us stronger, and yesterday I stitched shut the second sock!




















The heel is Frolicking Feet in the Indigo Purple colorway.

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