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?
