This is far and away my most popular work published yet; made last spring for a discord server’s weekly theme, “Cozy.” I’ve decided the caterpillar’s name is Jackson, after the kind old gardener who introduced my sister and I to his summertime pests when we were little. (More like summertime pets, am I right?)
While considering whether to participate in the challenge, I went looking for a tutorial for knitting with geometry nodes (thinking I could make a joke about a granny getting carried away making cozies for everything). But instead, I found Erindale’s tutorial on UV-based procedural knit textures and wanted to test it on something more complex than a square plane. And then there was a tomato hornworm.
It was a fun puzzle combining armature, object, and shape key animations to get a slightly hacky knit loop together in a week. The only things I added after the deadline were sound design (self-recorded foley and CC0 nature sounds) and an improvement to the loop of the modified Unsplash image from Matteo Silvestri in the background.
Proudest moments so far:
A weaver on Twitter who had tried to learn knitting before, for whom the theory clicked while watching this loop.
The surprise of getting an honorable mention in the challenge, and the judge’s heartfelt appraisal of it: “This one is disgusting...but darn cozy.”
Video description under the cut.
[Video id: a short 3D animated loop of a plump caterpillar (identified as a tomato hornworm) knitting its own cocoon. Its body centered in the vertical video, the hornworm is a light green with large wrinkles across its back, four shiny dark eyes set low and wide in its face, and light colored mouth parts and legs. Its legs are just visible through the top stitches of the fuzzy yarn on silver-tipped circular knitting needles. The cocoon is stockinette stitch from the outside; the hornworm is purling left-handed. Its cocoon is rounded at the bottom, presumably holding the hornworm's curled body, and has seven stripes of various thickness. The yarn has fine hairs on it, like eyelash yarn, and its color blocks are variations of blue and plum until the most recent rows, which are bright orange. On either side of the hornworm are two vertically stretched strands of orange yarn from which the whole pupa is hanging; they periodically twang from released tension during the knitting-driven rotation. Behind the hornworm is an out-of-focus copse of trees and lush green grass, lit from the left by dappled morning light. The hornworm and its cocoon are lit indirectly with softer light from the left. The yarn fuzz and randomized stitch colors on the pupa cross-fade every four seconds as the pupa rotates. Each active stitch on the needles, while in motion to form a new stitch, is without fuzz; this is the only part of the looped animation that pops in and out. The artist’s social media handle is written in green in the lower right: @cjgladback ]
I’ve been at this since like September. Originally the plan was to do five panels but by the time I reached three I realized it was absolutely going to be too heavy. If the back bothers me then I’ll just buy some black fabric and sew it on.
I pinned it excessively since I have been warned the feathers won’t flatten unless blocked aggressively. They still don’t behave themselves 100% but again, if it bothers me I’m willing to steam block it in the future. Super fun before and after pics.
Pattern is of course the feathered wings shawl by my favorite pattern designer craftyintentions.
I went to my first fiber festival this past weekend! Hoosier Hills Fiber Festival; if I'm still in this state come June next year, I'll probably be back and would love to meet anybody else there. Socializing/hanging out/talking to people without feeling like I was obstructing Real Customers was the one thing I missed, though I didn't really get to any of the free lectures so maybe that's where I could've met some people. Since it was an unknown situation with a lot of people and nearly an hour drive each way, I strategized to make sure I'd go:
First day, I signed up for a couple volunteer shifts. Absolutely a recommended strategy.
Got to be helpful!
They happened to have goodie bags, to help me justify the gas and time (I now have a nice tape measure to replace the one that's been vacationing with a missing sewing kit for a couple years and a lasercut wood two-inch gauge window that might help me with consistency versus my suboptimal practice of just trying to knit perfect squares when swatching in pattern)
I got to learn things about the layout and schedule I wouldn't know to ask when answering questions and acting as a gofer -- especially true working two different locations
And of course, some people were pretty much guaranteed to be happy to see me!
Second day, I signed up for a workshop in the morning so I'd be there and able to shop for anything I needed at the end. Ombre yarn dyeing was the class! It's acid dyes, something I'm several years off from wanting to get into enough to commit to dedicated cookware, full pots of dye powder, etc. The room with the workshop was a barn that had plenty of outlets--but they did not represent plenty of breakers. So there weren't quite enough functional heating elements for the class to have sufficiently cooked our yarn before leaving, and I did need to risk a giant stock pot at home for three batches of four jars, almost-simmering in a water bath for thirty minutes each, of the yarn that hadn't proven it was done (all but the two palest greens). I was a little worried the delay/drawn out heat situation would affect the results but if it did it wasn't much; I got pretty much exactly what I was hoping for with my two color gradient and the single is great too!
The single dye gradient is the color Moss, which did some interesting things with the red portion separating out once they were heated. Every skein has redder blotches, so I'm not bothered about any inconsistency -- if anything it'll help my finished product camouflage stains. Though it was definitely a surprise for me and the other Moss user in the class when our first yarn to have exhausted the dye was the complementary color to what it went in as.
The two color gradient used Rhodamine Red on one end, which was one end of one of our instructor's samples where she chose a cool-green for the other end to show how multi-component dyes mix less predictably than most paint. (It was kinda like shading with markers where you can still see washes of the pink and green in what you squint at and call a grey-brown.) The other end was Cantaloupe, which was one of the maybe three colors she didn't have a sample cut of yarn for. But she described it as the flesh of a perfect ripe cantaloupe and obviously I had to see that, and it sounded like it would be fairly guaranteed to combine nicely with the magenta while being just enough around a bend in the color wheel to be interesting--warm orange versus cool pink. As I said, it turned out pretty much exactly as I was picturing. Not anticipated was how much the jars looked like they were full of some delicious dragonfruit-mango beverage. Were I still a barista I'd be trying to recreate this for my shift drink.
Image descriptions under the cut.
[ID: Five images following fourteen small skeins of sock yarn dyed in individual glass jars, in two gradients. One gradient is six skeins from a medium forest green through a pale creamy pink, the other is eight skeins from a vibrant yellow orange through an even more vibrant magenta. The first photo is inside under fluorescent lights, showing the 32oz glass canning jars with metal lids and rings, full of dye and yarn on a table at the end of the class in which they were filled and heated for a short time.
The next two images are animated gifs. The first gif is two frames showing the finished dye jars sitting in grass, with their yarn and with it removed. The green gradient left only transparent blue color in its jars, and most of the pink to orange gradient's water looks more orange without its yarn, aside from the third and fourth jars from the orange end, which shade toward a neon lilac with the peachy pink yarn removed. The second gif is a view of the inside of the bright green wash bucket, with just the pink-orange yarn in it, then all of them mixed up, all as they were after a soak with the rust-brown water, in the first rinse, and that rinse water alone showing its transparent but still brown tint.
The last two photos show the gradients lined up along a weathered wooden bench on the side of a deck. The first photo has the wet piles of yarn bundled in front of each of their respective jars with remaining dye. The final photo has the clean, dry yarn wound into center-pull balls and still vibrant in the direct sunlight. End ID]
I'm officially going to this festival again this year! Had to miss last year due to starting my job the previous week, but now I not only have the time off but have signed up for a volunteer shift and class again to get me there.
I will also be walking away with more fluff from that class, despite still not having finished processing those fleeces from two years ago, and I refuse to feel sheepish about it. Pun acknowledged.
i desperately need like a canopy bed or a tent bed or an in-wall bed or something i need to be tucked in i need to be protected from the elements i need to be in a little hole in a den in a nest im just a prey animal trying to get by
Since a few friends/coworkers of mine have been getting into quilting (I simply don't have the space), I took extra notice when Carly B, my designated patchwork YouTube creator, made another one this week. And because it's imitating one unified fabric and probably also due to the athletic/menswear references, it's a slightly more understated one I could imagine wearing! So wanted to share here while I had the link in my clipboard.
The closer to the modern era you get the more fascinating "lost at sea" becomes as a backstory element. Being lost at sea in 1612 is a downright normal kind of lost to be. Being lost at sea in 2012 is like, okay, back up – I need to hear this one.
happy 20 year anniversary of Neil banging out the tunes!
though every rat is special, it's a wonderful and unusual thing for their accomplishments to be remembered and cherished by so many people so many years later. we're all so fortunate to know about the rat who banged out the tunes!
thank you to all the people who sent me reference photos of their beloved rats for this piece!!! credits under the cut!
@joe-spookyy Ben and Socrates
@gooseontheinternet Chamomile and Beefy
@runawayy-rat Bartholomäus and Emo
@theunholystromboli Macrogryphosaurus, Xenoceratops, and Graciliraptor
@techlecticwtch Solas and Dorian
@merlyn-bane Roslyn and Rizzoli
@logictoinsanity Luna and Buttercup
@hagsthehag Orphie, Psyche, Calypso, Ariadne, and Eury
