The Critter Knitter strikes again!

This year, the challenge was on: what could I knit for Erica and Lauren for their birthdays that would be unique, special, and suited to their personalities? Lauren likes to play a chasing/screaming game called 

Elephant Man, so I undertook my first elephant. It was big. It was grey. It took a long time. Trunk to tail, he measures more than two feet long. During his construction I came down feverish, and he began to freak me out. I thought he was going to start walking.

Erica has been asking for a unicorn for a LONG time. She's just a unicorn kind of girl. I couldn't find a pattern, in fact couldn't even find a workable horse pattern, so had to adapt a zebra. He looks fine here, but falls over due to a very large head. Personally I like his gold-tasseled blanket and the star pendant around his neck that you can't see. All mystical.

I have very little experience with dollmaking - did an angel doll for Christmas, but what else? Oh yes, Harold Lloyd, the juju who sits on my desk. Dolls potentially contain a lot of power, especially "likeness" dolls, and they must be handled carefully. I infused each of these dolls (Lauren, left; Erica, right) with the spirits of the girls I was giving them to. Making the clothes was fun, too. Here they wear their hippie fun-fur coats.

It pays to accessorize! I did these little handbags freehand, and stuffed them with "fuzzbugs", little knitted caterpillars you make with the Wonder Knitter. Lauren shrieked with delight when she found hers. I also made long fuzzy scarves, but didn't photograph them because they completely cover the dolls' faces.

BEST FRIENDS FOREVER!

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

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Sacrificial lamb (short fiction)

May 24, 2013

This is The Day, but I don’t feel like celebrating it. I just feel like kicking my life into the gutter. There seems to be nothing to celebrate but rancor, unresolved issues and chronic pain.

I am completely fed up by the last “episode” which happened yesterday. I’ve been thinking of giving Carol a gag gift for her birthday (on Monday – we’re babysitting the grandkids then). I thought of designing and knitting a doll that looked like her, but had no luck and turned it into something else.

Then I thought: Desiree has been nagging and nagging her to get a dog (and she hates dogs), so what if I did her a little dog? I’ll tell you, it was one of the hardest and fiddliest things I ever tried. I went through 3 different patterns and once I settled on one, threw 2 nearly-finished ones out. Had to go to Michaels to find some wool I could use, even though I am drowning in wool and have bins and bins of it. It was all extremely expensive and not suitable.

Plus would an executive like her want a little knitted dog? She isn’t the type to put it on her desk. Hardly. And she doesn’t want to be reminded of her mother, does she, how she sits there and knits all day when she could have made something of herself?

Well, maybe Desiree would adopt it. She likes dogs. So finally yesterday I made something I thought was OK, but put it aside, thinking, I probably won’t give it to Carol. Then (typical of me, never giving up when I know I should), this morning I got up and thought, hmm, it’s really not so bad (a sane person would have thrown it out, probably) and began to personalize it, giving it features, perked ears and a long tail, collar and tag, etc. I truly believe that my persistence is the worst trait I have because it never leads to anything good.

When I was finished, or at least I thought it was finished, I told Roy I was going to give it to Carol as a gag birthday gift (I'd been talking about making her a dog for weeks) and asked him, “what do you think?” He looked at it for a while, then said, “It could be one of two things. A small bear or a lamb."

A lamb, a fucking lamb! With a collar and tag and a long black tail. I was just so bloody upset after all that hard work, told him I was going to throw it out, headed over to the garbage pail, grabbed the scissors to eviscerate it, then he started saying things like “You’re crazy!” 

I couldn’t believe Mr. Wonderful and Perfect would say such a thing. For me, it’s the worst there is. It’s like saying, “it doesn’t matter how much hard work and effort you’ve put in over years and years to try to get your life back on track after a horrendous mental breakdown that nearly destroyed you. YOU’RE CRAZY.” This is exactly what my sister (the most vindictive human being I have ever had the misfortune of encountering) used to say to me when she really wanted to twist the knife. My sister, the one who used to invite me to those drunken adult parties and could not understand why I wasn’t “grateful”.

No one, but no one can begin to fathom the loneliness of a mental breakdown, the long, long wilderness walk, so often stumbling and falling on my face, the utter disgrace of the hospital, the guilt and filth in my soul that can never be washed clean. As long as I “act normal” I am more or less OK, but routinely, at intervals, I must have “you’re crazy!” hurled at me by the person who loves me best in the whole wide world. To keep me in line, I suppose.

It almost works.

Even though he is basically an asshole, it always ends up with Roy acting like he is the Saint, the one who “puts up with” this banshee of a woman, this crazy woman who actually has EMOTIONS and doesn’t keep it all inside like she is supposed to, who sometimes just boils over, and “why would that be?” Then he comes out with “you ALWAYS say that,” “it doesn’t matter what I say, you always yell at me, I’m always wrong,” etc. He does not know how many times in the course of the day I bite my tongue just to keep the peace and to keep him from putting on his martyr routine. Honestly, I wonder if I walked out or just died, how long would it take before he even noticed? He would have to find some other instrument for feeling constantly wronged and hurt without any provocation whatsoever, so maybe he’d miss THAT. He’d miss being crowned the Saint every day.

These are the things that never get solved, and they come up again and again. No use “trying to explain it to him” as I’ve been told to do 100 times, how much it hurts me for him to say these things. He pulls them out and uses them again and again because he knows damn well it is the worst thing he can possibly say to me. I always felt if we went into marriage counselling we’d just walk away from each other, as too many things would be dragged up from his side, i. e. putting up with my “craziness” for 40 years. (I’d know enough to keep my mouth shut. Mental patients have no rights.) I try to get past it and finally have to let it go because there’s nothing I can do about it.

How is marriage supposed to be? Nobody tells you, any more than they tell you how to be a mother. You just flail around and hope for the best and try not to kill each other. I think people think: hey, he doesn’t drink or smoke or screw around, so why can’t you be happy? This is as good as you will ever do. What's the matter, aren't you grateful?

Now I really don’t know whether I should give my daughter what I made for her, that lamb or bear or whatever-the-fuck-it-is, knowing her propensity for zingers. I certainly don’t need any more of THOSE in my life. I just want to show her I care about her. We aren’t a very demonstrative family and the very rare time I hug Carol, she stiffens like a tree trunk.

A LAMB. Oh yes, I’d be giving her a baby lamb for her birthday, that makes a lot of sense! I might as well play the tape right now, of she and her husband denigrating it when they’re alone. Yet, strangely, after all that work and effort I don’t want to throw it away or give it to someone else. I know she believes that I have basically wasted my life and spend all my time knitting and making stuffed animals. It’s as if she sucked all the ambition and achievement out of me and used it for her own purposes.

Anyway, today at this moment I am reminded of Sylvia Fraser calling families “killing fields”. They are all I have and I feel so poorly equipped to handle any of it, so I just go along with everything and when I do explode, I am “crazy”. They should live inside my skin for ONE day and see how easy it is.

So today, we are 40 years old and I regret every goddamn minute of it. If I had a loaded gun, I wouldn’t trust myself in the same room with him. My life partner, the one who has endured me for all this time and put up with my incessant craziness and the fact I don’t contribute anything to the marriage at all.

Happy anniversary.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

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The Sacred Sweater, Vol. II

Shit on a stick, did I ever have a hard time with that last post. Trying to convert the text into something my blog would accept took forever.

But I persevered, mainly because I thought this piece was so astonishing. The actual text goes on for ten pages or so, and covers most of the Bible, even the Old Testament, in which the "teacher" says all the little Hebrew boys were being slain because "those Hebrews were just breeding like rabbits".

This thing reeks of fundamentalism, not to mention racism, with even the most innocent act (knitting!) dragged in to illustrate scriptural precepts. The thing that astonishes me is how long I fell for this. I was "in" this milieu for something like fifteen years before I came to realize that somewhere along the way, it had come to mean almost nothing to me.

It wasn't so much scripture, which can be interesting if contradictory (as is Jesus). It was the people trying to convey the messages. Hardly anyone I encountered in all that time seemed to have anything more than a superficial knowledge of what this was all about.

You see, the old-time message behind the Bible is that we're basically no goddamn good, if you'll pardon the language. We're selfish and hard-hearted and besides that, we have sex! We have sex. Do you know what people actually do when they have sex? And they enjoy it. Could it be worse?

So it's very important either to not have sex, or, if we do have it, not to enjoy it due to guilt, shame and a smothering feeling of sin that will never go away.

We were always controlled by guilt, not to mention shame and a sense of fundamental unworthiness and irredeemable filth that could "only" be cleansed by Jesus. Trouble was, we had to keep doing this over and over and over again, pretty much every Sunday.

We never quite "got there," as if the goal was to become some saintly figure that no one else would be able to stand.  We always had to go against, against, against our true nature, or God wouldn't love us any more. Certainly, the pecksniffs at church wouldn't - that is, if they ever loved us in the first place.

So. We have the Biblical teddy bear sweater, and later on in the 10 or 12 pages of this drivel she uses the term "bear" in the most groaningly punning way. We "bear with" our sorrows, etc. I have to say, though, that though I may just try that little knitting pattern, I found her theology not so much unbearable as a complete sack of shit.

Confession: I killed a panda (with scissors)

So we all know what pandas look like. Roly-poly, black-masked, adorable,  with their woolly black-and-white contrasted coat. I wouldn't get in a cage with one, but I can admire their cuddlyness from afar.

So Caitlin said to me not long ago:

Grandma.

Yes, Caitlin.

Could you knit me something?

Sure, what would you like?

Could you knit me a panda?

 

A panda? I had so many panda patterns I didn't know where to start. Most of them were plain lousy, or even frightening.

This poor guy looks as if he was run over by a truck.

But hel-lo-o-o-o-o-o:  what was this? Just about the cutest knitted panda pattern I've ever seen! And he looked easy to make. The pattern came from World of Knitted Toys by Kath Dalmeny,  a book I've used for several successful projects, such as many of the characters in my Ugly Duckling story  which I gave Erica and Lauren for their birthdays.

I showed her the pattern. "I want it! I want it!" Caitlin said, so I told her, alrighty then, I'll knit it for you.

And then.

Well, it got weird.

Then weirder.

This thing didn't look like a panda at all: more like an anteater who was a victim of Monty Python's Owl Stretching Time.

By the time I finished the body, which was knitted in one piece, I knew I was in trouble. It looked like a fat bowling pin crossed with a pig. The head had a strange point on it, and was twice the size of the body. The eye-patches were about 2" too long.

Where did I go wrong???

Trying to sew the legs on was worse: they were long, skinny and tubular, and the animal wouldn't stand up. It splayed on the floor like a disabled anteater.

I  stuffed the body, tried and tried to sculpt it into some kind of shape that wasn't totally grotesque. It didn't work. I tried to open it up so I could unravel it and salvage the wool, which was very expensive.

No dice. It wouldn't happen. I took scissors to the thing, hacking the head off so I could at least have the stuffing back.  My panda lay before me, a mass of unravelled wool and destroyed morale.

I felt like crap. Obviously I had done something very wrong, but what?

Then this morning, something happened. . .

I found an example of the same (finished) panda on a web site called Random Meanderings. This entry is for some time in 2009.

OK then. . . it's supposed to look like  a pig on stilts!

Yes. It has a definite piglet quality, with elongated limbs, as if someone had fed it growth hormone.

And it doesn't look like it would stand up, either, with those floppy legs. For the sake of comparison, let's take another look at the original, then Piggy:

So it wasn't my fault. Moreover, it looks to me as if Random Meanderings followed the pattern exactly. It wasn't bad knitting, at all. In fact it looked very neatly done, which is not such an easy thing with a larger stuffy.

But this is what she got: a "what-is-it?", which I simply could not give to Caitlin.

The only thing I could think of was that I used a yarn substitution. These patterns all call for something called DK, which is not available in Canada and which no one has even heard of in yarn shops (which don't exist any more anyway - you have to dive into sale bins at Walmart).  I used a thinner version of "worsted weight", which makes up 90% of the yarn you can get here. It varies from almost threadlike to so massively thick, it should be labelled "super bulky".

(Blogger's note. No, that's not true. The funny-looking panda was knitted with the correct yarn and STILL came out looking like an English Bull Terrier with anteater genes.)

Whew. These two could be cousins. Is that genetically possible?  Anyway, my poor trashed  anteater-panda didn't look nearly as good as this one because it had weird bumps and bulges and a lot of very visible seams. It didn't look so much like a handsome English Bull Terrior as Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh.

 

Let me tell you my best and worst traits:

(a) I never give up.

(b) I never give up.

I just can't. I have to try again, try to win, because failure opens up a desperate plug-hole in the bottom of my spirit, causing all my will to live to drain away.

In my life, I've had about 90% failure, so you can imagine how I feel when something like this happens.

We live in an age where we can order a pattern for a few dollars, and get it via email within the hour. I decided to gamble on Debi Birkin because I think her patterns are brilliant. I was even able to manage Piecrust the Tortoise (below), though it still doesn't look like the original picture.

I made a turtle family which I gave my daughter-in-law for her birthday. The pattern was challenging enough to be interesting, but never once felt the wrath of my scissors or the ripping-out of fibrefill guts.

So now, probably stupidly, I will essay to waste still more money on still more black-and-white wool to try to make Ping Pong Panda. If he turns out at all, he'll be more of a cuddly teddy than a stand-up panda (who never stood up anyway).  But hey - if all else fails, I'll still have that tiny blue sweater. 

(Coda: I found this entry on a site called Stream of Consciousness, dated sometime in 2005. Makes me feel even better, because this panda is a lot closer to the original photo and the knitter STILL doesn't like the result.)

Monday, January 24, 2005

I received The World of Knitted Toys for Christmas. I decided to try a panda bear. It knitted up quickly, but finishing took forever. For me, finishing stuff is not nearly as fun as knitting. Oh well, I'm not terribly pleased with the end product. The corners are too square. And his legs seem awfully long. Maybe next time I'll try something with fewer parts.

Here's the funny looking Panda:

And now, for something completely different

Yesterday's rant stirred up some mixed feelings in me. It was one of those posts I usually delete because it comes from so far out in left field. But I decided to leave it up.  Please take it as irony of the most iron kind.

And in case you're wondering, my own marriage is nothing like that! Even as I write, I hear the vacuum cleaner running downstairs, and it ain't the cleaning lady. Later on he will put a meat loaf in the oven. Oh yes.

To provide some counterweight, I hope, I hereby display the rest of the stuffies I knitted for Lauren and Erica's joint birthday party on Saturday. I'm proud of these. They were fun to make, but also a lot of work. They are, top to bottom, the Ugly Ducking all grown up, plus his girl friend (and later, wife) Melinda Mallard;

A grizzly bear, unnamed (yes, I know there isn't a grizzly bear in The Ugly Duckling, but there was in my version; this one was so hard to make he was in and out of the garbage pail several times);

A penguin, definitely NOT in the story (one of the hits of the evening, though it was the easiest to make);

A dolphin, likewise, who looks like a girl dolphin (dolphinette?) to me;

And some ladybugs. Lauren loves them, and it's the name of her team for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Walk for the Cure, which convened on Sunday, Grandma and Grandpa included. The five-kilometer walk was a bit of a stretch for us old people, but hey, it was for the best cause ever!

The Don Corleone School of Knitting

Every so often, about every six years or so, I find something on the internet that makes me want to dance with joy.

I've been researching a form of Japanese knit/crochet called amigurumi,  miniatures of imaginary creatures done on very fine needles. This has been extended in recent years to include slightly larger forms of real critters such as octopi, crabs, snails, etc., so of course I have to get into the game. I've been trying to find free patterns and mostly striking out because they involve either crocheting or knitting in the round (which I've never learned to do, though I am currently adapting a Frog Prince pattern from four needles to two). I've sent away for a book and can't wait for it to arrive cuzzadafact that I want to knit a snail for my granddaughter Erica's birthday. She loves snails and keeps real ones as pets.

But this! You can actually knit the horse's head from The Godfather, life-size, and it's beautiful, too. I found the pattern free, and I'll post the link here. It would make a delightful pillow for the film buff and a much more sanitary version of the real thing.

No horses were harmed in the making of this pillow. But the back of the neck view is pretty disgusting.

http://www.theanticraft.com/archive/imbolc08/mredless.htm


(For those of you who can't get through the whole pattern, this-here's the best part. Make sure you have the right yarn colors: severed neck is red, vertebrae white, and
esophagus/trachea light pink.)

Severed Neck:

Using the red yarn, CO 20 sts.

You will now be returning to the 76 sts of the neck edge and changing color as well as finishing the hemmed edge.

Pick up a purl bump from two rounds below the turning round and place it on the left hand needle. Using the red yarn knit the stitch just picked up together with the next stitch on the left hand needle. Note: I always have a difficult time figuring out which row the purl bump I need is from, so before I started this round I ran a piece of embroidery thread through all the bumps I would be picking up.

Repeat around the edge. (96 sts)

Join and work in the round (either using one circular and magic loop or splitting the stitches up onto two circulars).

Knit two rounds, on second round place a marker every 16 sts.

Dec Rnd: *knit to two stitches before marker, k2tog* to end of rnd

Next Rnd: knit

Repeat last two rows until 54 sts remain, then work the decrease round for every round.

When 6 sts remain, cut yarn and using tapestry needle pull yarn through all stitches and then to the inside of neck.

Vertebrae:

Using white yarn, CO 28 sts, join and work in the round.

Rnds 1-10: knit
Rnd 11: purl
Rnd 12: knit
Rnd 13: Switch to red yarn and knit all sts
Rnd 14: * k2tog, k3, ssk* to end of rnd (20 sts)
Rnd 15: knit
Rnd 16: *k2tog, k1, ssk* to end of rnd (12 sts)
Rnd 17: knit
Rnd 18: s2kp four times (4 sts)

Cut yarn and using tapestry needle pull yarn through all stitches and then to the inside of piece. Stuff and sew to severed neck edge.

Esophagus/Trachea: (Make two.)

Using the light pink yarn, CO 24 sts, join and work in the round.

Rnds 1-3: knit
Rnd 4: purl
Rnds 5-7: knit

BO all sts.

Fold cast on edge to inside, and sew both edges together.

Sew to severed neck edge.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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