#queeringknitting

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I knit my friend a giant cowl and they call it “my monster cowl” and I feel pretty good about that. Their name is Deanna and let’s talk about it. 

I am going to keep it short because Deanna has zero patience for bullshit and that is what I love about them. When me and Deanna get together, we talk tarot, feelings and mostly trade stories about what bullshit we’ve encountered since the last time we’ve hung out. Deanna is a peer, comrade and a fellow chronic pain babe, and we’ve got each other's backs.  We’ve been friends for over five years and if there is anyone who enjoys their company more than me, it’s my dog, Remy. 

Now Remy loves everyone who he even likes mildly, but Deanna is there in the top five on his list of humans he loses his shit over. I know the question on your mind right now is “when is the dog sweater post coming?” Once I can make sure to make something the correct size and shape, I will put my dog in a sweater, I promise. 

Deanna! Deanna likes: all dogs but especially Remy, dying their hair blue, mermaid aesthetics, doing nothing half-assed, going full femme when they feel like it, being sassy, things that are made out of leather, and learning new niche skills. 

This cowl is huge! I used six big skeins of worsted weight yarn. I wanted to make something big and with a hood. My inspiration for this cowl was to make something Robin Hood would wear, so the cowl fits over the head and can cover most of the arm and shoulders. Deanna mostly wears it scarf style and that is the warmest way to wear it. For Deanna I wanted to make something a Slytherin would wear. 

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This is my gorgeous friend Katie wearing a scarf I made her. Merry Christmas! Katie is a newer friend of mine so I will keep it short and sweet. Katie is a barista who works around the corner from me, and I like visiting her at work and writing in my journal while drinking very good coffee. Katie is the most extroverted person I know and being around her is extremely fun. She’s the kind of person who is so good at socializing, that all you want to do when you are around her is talk to her and whoever she is talking to. 

Katie likes: being a vegan, being a flirt, being around a ton of queerios, tattoos, her girlfriend, people visiting her at work, big tippers, wearing a bold lip, getting coffee with friends, getting the latest gossip, and her pet kitten.

Her instagram always cheers me up, it’s got coffee, cats and qts. (at)femmekatie on Insta. 

I made this scarflette with Lily Sugar and Cream in Red.  I wanted to make something to match a bold lip, but with enough lace in it so that her clothes could pop through the knit. It’s a freestyle lace knit.

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I knit my mom a blanket! Her name is Naomi, and it’s November which means I am thinking about my family and this seemed like the perfect sequel to the post about my big sister Greta. 

My mom is a pretty amazing mom to have. She is a NEW YORK FUCKING CITY artist and does mostly cityscapes and subway scenes with some seascapes from Coney Island and some landscapes from Prospect Park and I gotta say all of her work just looks like home to me. She has been a member of The Bowery Gallery for as long as I have been alive and then some so check out her portfolio. I especially like this one of the Gowanus Canal.

Outside of painting, my mom has really active when it comes to advocating for healthcare for all. Here is her being herself, at a die-in outside borough hall last March. So Obamacare is what allowed my twin sister to survive her chordoma and it’s a really big deal. If you want to help my mom out, please donate some $$ to The Chordoma Foundation. 

My mom’s painting aesthetic tends to be into big chunks of bold colors with dramatic shading, so I wanted to knit her something that looked like how she painted and I think I did a pretty good job. I chose my biggest cable and cast on an ungodly amount of stitches and just tapered from there. To make a point. Each big stripe was a skein of yarn. I used many different brands but kept to worsted weight acrylic yarn. You know who loves this blanket even more than my mom is the cats, Bruce and Jennifer who are both blurry and very cute. 

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It’s November which means I am thinking about my family and hey look it’s my big sister wearing the first official sweater I ever made. Greta is my big sister and is in law school right now which I will always take credit for as being my idea. 

Growing up, my big sister used to tell me all kinds of stories. She was a counselor at my summer camp one year and for the rest of the year, she would tell me and my twin sister stories based on our experiences at summer camp, using the other counselors as a cast of characters. The main character and hero of these stories was her fictitious boyfriend, who was an exchange student, and well-meaning but not the sharpest pencil in the pack. I’m the only one in my family who plays Dungeons and Dragons but I feel like those stories growing up means that Greta has a ton of secret DM potential if she ever felt like giving it a whack. Oh hey, here is her cat Pippi, named after Pippi Longstockings, named after Greta’s hero from when she was a kid.

Greta likes: her cat, a great keto recipe, her new boyfriend David (who I met and who is very nice,) taking selfies with her cat, watching Dexter and Silence of the Lambs, and in general is kinda a sucker for a great serial killer story. You know Pippi loves Greta a lot but I feel like Pipi is kind of a lil killer herself. I tried to get her to go inside of her cat carrier once, and I thought I was going to die.   

I knit Greta the sweater after she got her divorce and I wanted her to know how proud I was of her for leaving that no good piece of human trash behind. Let’s hear it for my big sister who is surviving and thriving now that the most draining person in her life has been canceled. She’s doing fantastic, has been divorced for a bit over a year, and is still kicking ass and taking names in school. 

She is wearing a kimono style sweater knit flat from right sleeve to left sleeve. It was knit in one big piece and then seamed together, and I knit from the waist down to add some length and sinching in the round after picking up stitches. I got a mesh fabric with cool highlights by using three strands of Woolike Yarn by Loops and Threads which is a superfine yarn and alternating between two strands of Sage and one strand of Rose and vice versa, on size 10 needles. 

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Let’s hear it for my friend Carlo who managed to take the best picture in the entire world. Lookit, on the beach with the golden light of the sunset, and dude’s wearing a wool coat. The only thing fucking it up is my yarn end came undone, and I’ll need to crochet it back into the scarf the next time I see him.

Carlo is a great friend to have because he’s nerdy and tbh, brilliant. 

-Carlo FOUNDED Elkcreek Cinema

-He’s got two degrees from Tisch NYU Film School which is a huge deal here in new york and internationally

-He made a short film, KNIFE POINT, and it is some seriously scary shit because it’s not just scary, it’s creepy, it’s haunting, it’s fucking beautiful and it’s rich complexity in color, shadow and cinematography makes it the thing you definitely don’t want to watch at three in the morning like I did, check it out.  KNIFE POINT premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, aired on Arte-TV, won Vimeo's Short of the Week, and for which he won "Best New Director" at the Brooklyn International Film Festival.

-He co-directed and produced the feature documentary THE SWELL SEASON which premiered at The Tribeca Film Festival, was the opening night film at Silverdocs, was released theatrically, and received The New York Times' Critic's Pick. Damn. Lookit, all those awards. I feel a little weird being friends with Carlo sometimes because you just know if you meet him that he is about to BLOW UP and the world has not prepared to play Pathfinder with Truffaut. 

-Carlo was selected for the 2011 Sundance Screenwriters Lab and the 2011 Sundance Directors Lab. He was a recipient of the Audrey & Zygi Wilf Foundation award for screenwriting. He is currently in pre-production on his first feature film. And I am really excited for what will happen for Carlo once that movie comes out and we can all watch it and the world will be introduced to his work. I am also just excited to watch it after watching KNIFE POINT and having the bejesus scared out of me. 

-In addition to all of his amazing film work, Carlo is a KICKASS Pathfinder player. This is Gristle, Carlo’s character, who is friends with my character, Maxima. Gristle is a goblin alchemist, he’s hilarious, endearing, resourceful and kind of my hero. 

Carlo likes: ice cream, Pathfinder, antlers, hooves, things that are of the creepy but earthy, like if David Lynch and Wes Anderson wanted to make a children’s book that was more of a warning about the absurdity world than it was about the moral of the story. Also, Carlo loves rats as pets. 

For Carlo’s piece, I wanted something regal and classic so this is just plain garter stitch in a true red using bulky yarn because I also wanted Carlo to stay warm. 

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Destiny Washington is a friend, a comrade and they will be famous one day so you better watch out. Destiny is that cool friend you knew in high school who never gave up on their dreams. Destiny is that friend you call when you want someone to be angry with because your ex is pissing you off, and then you ask Destiny “hey, I want to rant for a while, is that okay,” because you respect the shit out of Destiny’s emotional labor. Destiny is that Sagittarius your astrologer warned you about. Destiny is the love child of coffee-dad (Mat,) and teacher-dad (Hugo,) from Dream Daddy, because she LOVES WRESTLING and knows all the cool bands you don’t, no big deal. 

Destiny likes: being a soon-to-be famous professional wrestler, (you can follow her Instagram @brooklynwaste ,) being amazing at graphic design, (look at her portfolio at BrooklynWaste.net,) ABC No Rio for DIY punk aesthetics, and the Catholic Worker’s movement for that intersection of the personal and the political. 

Destiny and I are comrades at work and in our struggle with chronic pain. So I wanted to knit something extremely warm for Destiny to keep their spine warm via their neck. This is an accordion cowl knit in the round, with a taper so she can wear it over her shoulders. I knit this with three strands of worsted weight yarn for thickness, so it is a bit of a rug but this is New York and it gets cold y’all. I knit most of it while watching Frontier, which I loved, and watched before Jason Mamoa stopped being hot, so the timing was ideal. 

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This is India who is a very big deal. India is a bestie for sure, we’ve known each other for about a year and we just super clicked. I met India playing Dungeons and Dragons, and now we are in TWO different campaigns together, one Pathfinder and one 5th edition where I DM. When we play Pathfinder, we both play half-orc femmes but her character, Saffronia, is very lawful and exacting while Maxima, my character, is impulsive, chaotic and often drunk. I could gush about India all day. Here’s Saffronia (Saff-ROAN-eye-ah.) 

Some of our favorite things to do together are: India comes over and I cook for them, and we eat while watching Netflix, co-facilitating our Octavia Butler book club, talking about magic, astrology, ancestor work or tarot, and talking about who we are dating and how we have tender feelings. 

India likes: karaoke, hard femme fashion, soft femme fashion, body positivity, Stranger Things, communicating about boundaries proactively, coffee with cream and no sugar, wearing purple and green, biking, contact sports, being in charge sometimes but not all of the time, only when she could be doing a better job than whoever is already in charge, and wearing a bold lip color. 

I wanted to make something for India in a color as bold and as she is so we went with deep pink. I used K2 TOG to make this cowl bell-shaped, knitted in the round, and used a combination of freestyle lace techniques like YO, K2, or YO, P2, with stockinette or reverse stockinette, knitting, and purling to give it some texture and decoration. TBH this is my fav way to knit. 

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This is my friend Yacine and you have never met anyone like him because that would be impossible. Yacine is extremely charming while remaining extremely genuine. I don’t know how it works but it’s fucking magical. Yacine and I met years ago, at the party of a mutual friend, but I never got a chance to really know Yacine until last year, when we started playing Dungeons and Dragons together. During this friendship reroll, I quickly discovered that Yacine, if he had a character sheet for himself, would have a really amazingly high charisma score, in addition to high wisdom and high intelligence. Yacine plays Quix in our game who is a gnome wizard. In real life, I think Yacine would also play a wizard. That is because Yacine works with Machine Learning, which is basically like teaching a robot how to love. In all seriousness, I am equally impressed with his commitment to try and help me understand Pathfinder rules as I am with how much he knows about algorithms. Check out how smart he is on his NYU page!

 Yacine likes: riding bikes, playing board games, being a mensch, being a trickster, singing my favorite karaoke songs like Fever and Dream Lover, letting folks know when something is fascist bullshit, and that it’s not like this everywhere, his amazing partner, and Le Petit Ecolier cookies. 

For Yacine I wanted a scarf that I thought his character would enjoy. Something fun but classy at the same time. So I cast on and gradually decreased the sides using K2 and had a trapezoid. The taper on the sides felt very gnome-y.