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.

Welcome

Well, this is my first entry for the Reclining Knitter, a blog about my knitting adventures.  During the day I'm busy working on my PhD in musicology, or writing articles for various disability related publications.    Given that I spend all day writing for a living, you might wonder why I choose to use my spare time writing a blog.  The simple answer is that I want an excuse to bang on about knitting.  It's become an obsession.  I spend my days thinking about yarn, planning projects and surreptitiously fondling passing fibres.  I'm hoping that writing this blog will help me get my obsession out of my system.

As you may have guessed from the title of this blog, I do most of my knitting lying down.  Okay, not exactly lying down, I am usually propped up on a heap of cushions.  I knit lying down because I have a disability called CFS/ME.  Actually, I do lots of things lying down.  Of course I sleep lying down, but I also watch TV lying down, eat and drink lying down, read and study lying down, I'm even writing this blog lying down.

Most of this lying down (apart from the sleeping bit) happens in our lounge room on the couch I call my nest.  My big, blue, squishy couch has had some pillows removed and lots more added to prop me up while giving me room to sprawl.  The area around my nest looks pretty cluttered.  Getting up and down isn't exactly my forte, so I like to have everything I need within arm's reach.  From here I can reach two knitting projects, a needlework project, a drink and a snack, various medications, knitting books, cook books, research books, all the remote controls, the cat's brush, rubbish bin and my laptop, all without having to sit up.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not bedridden or housebound, not at the moment anyway.  Like I mentioned earlier, I'm a postgraduate musicology student and I write regular articles for Ramp Up, Link, and DiVine.  I help out in my university's archive.  I also play percussion in two bands (don't picture me as a cool rocker though. I definitely make musicianship look daggy, but I am great with a tambourine).  I have a large extended family and a love life which is, shall we say, eccentric.  I'm quite capable of doing all the things you can do, as long as I do them in short bursts.  In between times I'm crashed out on my couch, armed only with my knitting and my laptop. 

It's this view from my nest, in the house we've nicknamed the fortress of solitude, that I'll be discussing here.  Enjoy!