Did I Really Knit That? When Knitting Gets Rude.

Warning: This blog post contains words describing parts of the body normally hidden from view.  If you think this will offend you don't read on.

You may not think of knitting as a raunchy art form, but I've made a few projects lately that may make you question that assumption. I'm not talking about deliberately suggestive projects.  I have one friend who makes penis shaped lip balm holders and another who knitted a placenta for her pre-natal class, but the projects I'm going to talk about today all had innocent beginnings.

I guess in hindsight I should have known that the first project was going to look weird.  It started when my partner (who is diabetic) was having circulation problems.  She wanted something to keep her extremities warm.  The extremity in question was her left nipple. She wanted something to keep her nipple warm while wandering bra-less around the house.

Fortunately for this project, Sue's breasts are not small.  In fact she describes them (quite accurately) as "long".  This meant that I could create a garment for them free from straps, relying only on gravity (and a pretty piece of ribbon) to hold it on.  If you can't figure out how this works, your breasts aren't long enough for it to work.

We named the piece her "tit snood", here it is (Sue declined to model it for the photo):

If I were making it again, I wouldn't have chosen such a contrasting colour for the nipple-warming section.  The purple makes it look like a giant, fluffy, gangrenous growth.  In my defence, I was thinking of function over form when I created it, and the purple fluffy yarn was the softest and warmest in my stash.  Fortunately Sue never had any plans for wearing her tit snood outside the house.

My second rude knitting project started entirely innocently, and indeed finished entirely innocently.  There was just a brief moment when things got a bit obscene.  The project in question is Patsie the Possum who I knitted for my newborn nephew Felix.  As a good little knitter, I followed the instructions for Patsie to the letter.  As I sewed up her side seems, I realised that the pattern left only one small hole for stuffing.  Here's Patsie (upside down) revealing her stuffing secrets:

Clearly this is not a moment to be knitting in public.  No one wants to be seen defiling an innocent possum while sitting on the train or in the doctor's office.

The third obscene project started out innocently, but unlike Patsie, I didn't discover its graphic nature until after it was finished.  All I wanted to do was knit a pencil case, so that I could put all my stuff for university in the one place without my pens, pencils, sticky notes and tape measure (for cataloging stuff in the music archive, not knitting) escaping all through my backpack.  The results seemed innocent enough:

But Sue has an eye for the obscene.  She immediately noticed that it was lined with red material.  She held it open in front of her crotch, looking for all the world like Celtic fertility goddess Sheila Na Gig and immediately christened the pencil case "my vagina":

So I've learnt the hard way not to line things with red material, but on the upside the pencil case has been focus of many household jokes.  It's now the virtual repository of anything that goes missing:
"Have you seen my yellow highlighter?"
"I think I left it in my vagina."
"Do you have a pencil sharpener?"
"There's one in my vagina."
"Have you got a tape measure?"
"Have you looked in your vagina?"

Now I'm trying to put my knitting obscenities behind me and have started knitting a perfectly innocent beanie.  Surely that can't go wrong can it?

The Reverse Boyfriend Knitting Curse

There is a lot of folklore that revolves around knitting.  Regular knitters will be familiar with the boyfriend jumper curse (or the boyfriend sweater curse for American readers).  For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it goes something like this: never knit your lover a jumper, or you'll be doomed to break up shortly after the gift is handed over.

photo credit: Lululemon Athletica

There are a number of reasons for this mysterious phenomenon. Firstly it takes a long time to knit a jumper.  I've been knitting one for almost a year and I haven't even started the sleeves.  This gives many relationships time to go from starry eyed to bitter and twisted. Another theory is that the recipient of the gift takes one look at the wonky, homemade garment, pictures a lifetime of being forced to wear fashion tragedies and runs like the wind.  Along the same line is the theory that the hard working knitter slaves away on the jumper, then seeing that their partner refuse to wear her brilliant work, dumps the ungrateful bum.

Recently I've discovered a related but opposite knitters' curse, I call it the Boyfriend Gift-Yarn curse, or if you will, the Reverse Boyfriend Knitting Curse.  Let me explain.  I was recently cataloguing my yarn stash (yes, I'm that nerdy) and I noticed how many unused balls of yarn I had that had been gifts from ex-lovers.  In a way it was nice, a reminder of good times (and a few bad ones).

photo credit: EraPhernalia Vintage

Now, it's not that I have been deliberately avoiding using this yarn, and it's good quality stuff, my lovers have excellent taste (they chose me after all), so why is this yarn outlasting my relationships? (Insert joke about my number of exes here.)  Of course there are a number of reasons, gift yarn is usually given in one or two ball lots, meaning your choice of project is limited, and it's not usually given with a specific purpose in mind.  I'm also a notoriously slow knitter, and yes, I've gone through a few lovers in the last few years.

So now that I've discovered this new curse, the question is, what should I do about it?  I mean, I don't want to doom my relationships, but on the other hand, I like receiving gifts of yarn.  So I've decided I'm not superstitious.... and I don't believe in knitting curses.  In the meantime, I want to ensure I keep getting given yarn by making sure news of the curse doesn't spread. So be sure not to read this post.  Thanks.

A Tropical Baby

Our family is celebrating this week.  Our clan has a new member.  Little Felix Ali has been welcomed to the world, first child of Emma and Chris and nephew to yours truly.

I've been ohhing and ahhing over photos of our gorgeous brown-eyed boy, but I am still waiting to meet him.  While I'm rugged up in my mountain home outside of Melbourne; Emma's job means that she, Chris and now Felix call Bangkok home.  Now the tyranny of distance has all sorts of implications on family life, but our extended family has always been tight knit despite being spread across the globe, so today I'm going to focus on just one important aspect: Its affect on my knitting.

Now, as you are all no doubt aware, knitting is an important part of welcoming any new baby, and here in chilly Melbourne there are plenty of things to choose from.  Like this blanket I knitted for baby Jordi-Lee:

But a baby in Bangkok isn't going to need woolly blankets, beanies, bootees or jumpers.  You see my dilemma.  Never fear though, brave reader, I found a knit-worthy solution: soft toys.

Now that I've started looking, there are some seriously cool knit toys around.  I'm very keen to knit a Henry Rollins doll from the pattern in Stitch and Bitch Nation, but I had to admit that that is more a gift Felix's dad Chris than for the bub himself.  I've also found patterns for knitted mobiles, vehicles, puppets, even stackable blocks... so much to choose from.

Just as I was sitting, confused and overwhelmed amid a huge pile of toy patterns, Nanna Olive came to the rescue by giving me a Patsie the Possum kit from Panda yarns.  Patsie is not only perfect for a new born (cuddly and easy to wash) but she's an Australian native, and will hopefully become a reminder that little Felix is an Aussie deep down. (Well a Thai-born Maldivian-Dutch-Aussie, but what's more Australian than that?)

So I embarked on knitting my first toy, hopefully the first of many.  It took a while to get my needles around the slippery, fluffy, synthetic yarn that would make Patsie so soft.  Everytime I had to do any shaping (and there is a lot of it) the needles would split the wool wildly.  Once I came to terms with that though, knitting Patsie was pretty easy.  The curly tail was particularly fun to make.  One warning though: it's not the best project to work on while knitting in public.  I spent much of the time looking like I had a squashed squirrel coming off my needles:

But after a long wait, little Felix has been born and Patsie is finished and ready for posting.  Here's a final look at her before she's shipped off to Thailand.  I must remember to poke a few breathing holes in the box.