Happy N7 Day everyone! In honor, I am playing the Citadel DLC in my long-delayed Insanity play through. I am not dead, though for the purposes of this blog, I may as well be. 😩 I have picked up the Fenris gloves a few times and made no progress on the embellishments I am trying to work out for the hands. I should probably simplify and move on, but I have chosen procrastination instead. I am sorry about that.
I hope you all are well and are enjoying today. It’s been nearly 10 years since Mass Effect 3 came out but the series still lives in my heart. At least the old knitting patterns are still there, for posterity.
https://biowearables.tumblr.com/patterns
I have been spending some time on a new hobby during the pandemic, I finally found one more expensive than knitting. 😝
Nerd Appropriate released the considerably better audio they recorded during the PAX East panel. (Though you cant hear the audience well.) Here’s the episode featuring just my script! I miss Nerd Appropriate, I really like that podcast. A lot of good interviews with BioWare actors. And Cissy Jones is just the nicest. 🥰
“Original Scripts. Live. Cold reads. Total awesomeness. Check out me, @selmaleh @courtenaytaylor @larissala @TheStrangeRebel and @NerdApprop
I made a last-minute trip to PAX East this year. Ash Sevilla of Nerd Approrpriate usually hosts several panels at these events. At PAX West he hosted the Annihilation Almanac, a panel of voice actors doing cold reads of scripts. When he asked for submissions for a similar panel at PAX East I figured I would give it a shot. I hadn’t planned to attend in person, Boston is a long ass way from San Francisco, but when my script got accepted everyone in my life jumped on me until I agreed to go.
On the panel was Cissy Jones @cissyspeaks, Briana White @TheStrangeRebel, Courtenay Taylor @courtenaytaylor, Sarah Elmaleh @selmaleh, and Larissa Gallagher @larissalamarck-blog. They are all just the nicest humans and amazing actors and I couldn’t believe what a great job they did on all the stories they read.
Nerd Appropriate will put out a nice-quality audio recording on their podcast in the coming days, and I got a video with sort of poor audio quality from my iPhone.
It’s still surreall, even now, to think that these amazing ladies said words I wrote and made those characters into real people.
The other thing I made this month was this Princess in Black costume for my daughter for Literacy Week. Even after taking it down to Raiface at Thanksgiving to get her help altering it, the bodice turned out funny coz she’s so skinny for her height according to this pattern.
I don’t know where this giant girl came from. She used to be so small.
But the cape is almost big enough for me and I think I look great. We need to bring capes back, y’all.
Merry Christmas, everyone! There hasn’t been a lot of knitting this year, but I got back into making things towards the end of the year. Raiface had to spend many weeks talking me through a couple of sewing projects.
I wanted to be Jareth the Goblin King for my husband’s holiday party this year. The party was Masquerade themed and Labyrinth was a very formative movie for me. ;) It was a shambolic return to my cosplay days, staying up til 3 am some nights sewing gussets into the arm syces when the pattern turned out to be too small.. working up til the minute I left and then some, trying to sew the sequin sections to the jacket in the car when my slapdash glue job failed. It was basically held together with straight pins but it lasted for the entire party.
I really want to try out some of your projects but I’ve never read a knitting chart before, any advice? Thessian toque in particular.
How to read knitting charts!
Personally I love knitting charts, they’re a map of the project I can SEE instead of trying to use my imagination. I’m way better at understanding the physicality of a project when I’m reading the chart, rather than a written pattern.
I found a really clear video on YouTube that walks you through reading a chart complete with visual aides. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv6ls-lZM_s&feature=youtu.be
But since I sometimes hate watching videos instead of just being able to scan some written instructions, I’ll try to write up the basics, and I’ll talk about the Thessian Toque pattern specifically.
Knitting charts are a visual representation of a knitting pattern as if you are looking at the RIGHT SIDE of the work. That means when you’re reading them, you start at the BOTTOM RIGHT corner of the chart, then read the first row from RIGHT to LEFT.
The next row will be a row on the WRONG SIDE of the work, which if you’re working a pattern flat (as in the Thessian Toque) you read the row from LEFT TO RIGHT.
If you’re working your pattern in the round, you always read every row from RIGHT TO LEFT since you are knitting back to the first stitch of the previous round every single time.
There are generally numbers along the bottom reading from RIGHT to LEFT which indicates which STITCH in a row you’re working. I additionally included a line of numbers going the opposite direction so you could read the same thing for the WS rows. The chart will also have a column of numbers up the side indicating which ROW you’re working in the pattern. Generally charts start with a RS row, so all the odd numbers are RS rows, all the even numbers are WS rows.
After understanding the flow of the chart, the next thing you have to understand is the key. Charts all have little symbols they use to represent the different stitches involved in a pattern. Each box generally represents one stitch, and the symbols in it will tell you which stitch it should be. If you’re working with multiple colors, as in the Thessian Toque, it will also tell you which color yarn to use.
I know the symbols on the Thessian Toque look stupidly complicated, but that’s largely a result of me trying to wrestle Google Sheets into something that resembled the really nice charts you find in printed books. Occassionally in my pattern you have a box that represents multiple stitches because trying to draw them to actual size distorted the chart to the point where it looked really weird. I think? It’s been 5 years, it’s hard to remember what my thought process was when writing that thing now. ;)
Particular to the Thessian Toque (and any charts with increases or decreases) the row of stitch numbers at the bottom don’t actually work when you start adding NO STITCH placeholders. A cell numbered 5 will actually be stitch 4 if you had a decrease the row before and a stitch is missing. And you have to add the NO STITCH placeholders because otherwise the charts start to look super weird and unreadable, particularly if you have increases or decreases in the middle of a row. I admit that because there are a bunch of weird increases in the Thessian Toque, the stitch number in that chart for anything other than the first couple of rows is inaccurate. Sorry!
My suggestion for you is to use the fact that it’s a spreadsheet to your advantage. Select the bottom right cell with your cursor, and then you can arrow your way through the row to see how many stitches of what you need to knit, and you can move your cursor through the row as you go to help you track where you are without always recounting the stitches on your needles. (At least, this is what I did when I was writing it.)
Use markers if you want to remind yourself of particular places in the pattern you need to remember, or to remind yourself whether you’re on a RS or WS row. In my personal opinion the chart isn’t the hardest part of that pattern, it’s the written sections where you’re doing short rows to get the tips of the tentacles to curve in the proper direction. I’m so sorry about those. ;)
It’s not nerdy, but this is what I’ve been working on for a few weeks. Sometimes you need a super simple project to get you out of a knitting slump. And I have been in a major knitting slump.
It’s been awhile, Tumblr. The last year has been sort of a blur of just not getting anything I wanted to do done. Took me awhile to figure out I had a persistent case of low-grade depression. Not unlike low-grade fever, it sort of sneaks up on you and just vaguely saps your will to do anything except all the tasks that can’t be ignored. I lost more than a year to it. Going through my Bullet Journal at the end of the year pretty starkly showed how few personal projects or even fun things I checked off my list last year. This is the first time I can remember getting to the end of the year and thinking thank goodness that fucking year is over.
I’m not out of it yet but I’m doing a lot better. I’ve entered 2019 with a determination to not let that happen again this year and near the top of my list is finishing those damn Fenris gloves.
If only I could blame Tumblr for this blog’s inactivity but.. no. ;) I just have not been knitting. I assume I am not the only knitter who goes into Knitting Slumps from time to time, especially when they’re like 80% done with some project, but the last stretch is haaaaard so you don’t do it? Sigh. I could just simplify that pattern, abandon the crazy bits I intended to knit for the hand but.. that is not my style. Still, this Tumblr drama has me considering the idea of getting a real domain to host the patterns I’ve already completed.
Hi, I'm so very happy to have found your patterns!!! YAY! I have a request however. I'd like to see the wrong side of the scarf right around the end of the Specter emblem and the start of the stripes, please and thank you.
Hey Anonymous! So happy you’re pleased with our patterns. Luckily I’ve already posted a picture of the part of the scarf in question in this http://biowearables.tumblr.com/post/151812323682/color-work-questions post on questions I get a lot about color work. Cheers!
PAX West Day 3! Or: The Day Lyssa Took Pictures Of Demo Booths. I have more, but the photo limit on Tumblr means I can't post them all. ;) We went to the Witcher 10th Anniversary panel. We played some games. We bought some merch. I'm really happy about my Firewatch shirt. The Campo Santos booth was great, all the people were in Firewatch ranger uniforms. The best booth was probably the Phantom Doctrine booth, with the chain link fences and the amazingly decorated desks.
Day Two: We did not attend PAX. Saturday tickets were sold out and we didn’t want to pay scalpers. Instead we had meals with local friends and did touristy stuff.
Chihuly Museum, Pop Culture Museum, Museum of Flight. The Pop Culture museum was pretty great. And had an Indie Game exhibit (see last photo in the set) so that was almost like PAX. The decor in the game exhibit looked particularly cool when photographed, since the lighting in 2D makes it look like pixels.
PAX West 2017 day one! I didn't take a ton of pictures. It was a day of panels, mostly, and a little wandering of the exhibition floor. We played one game, Spy Party, where you either play as a Spy who has to complete tasks or as the Sniper who has to figure out which person is the Spy. Playing as Sniper is hard, but I did get to shoot my husband in his Spy face, so that was fun. I also went to the Wyrmwood booth to stare longingly at all the beautiful things I have no use for. Sigh. The last picture is the booth for The Amazing Eternals, which I didn't play but I appreciated the booth decor. The old skool TV monitors were so cute. There was one fellow knitter who asked about the Thessian Toque, so obviously coming to this con was 100% worth it. ;)
andulkaphoto
blakekathryn
prguitarman
turnnoffyourmind
yousharknotpass
