Tools

What is absolutely neccesary to knit?
Sticks and some kind of string. Over a long time this has turned into the modern needles and yarn.

And a lot of pictures on the internet

What is wrong with you people? RUN!!!

This is pretty much all a knitter really needs to make something. Sure, we fancy it up by having different sizes, materials and styles of needles and yarn, but it all boils down to the same basic supplies.

The really fancy supplies come in the form of accessories. There is an innumerable amount of little gadgets and gizmos that people use to help them in their knitting.

Today we'll look at some of my favorites, so what better place to start than my toolkit?

This little box was given to me by a good friend

On the left side we have some of my favorite things in the world. The Handi tool from Susan Bates. This is a small aluminum crochet hook with a point on the opposite end. It is the greatest tool I have for picking up stitches and undoing knots. I actually recently lost the one that I had and started freaking out. I was unable to find it and eventually had to get another one. When we went to the store dad suggested I get 2 because they are inexpensive. It's a beautiful tool, cheap yet useful and practical. While it may not be absolutely necessary, I've come to love using it and rely on it.

Moving right we see some buttons and 2 pairs of scissors. The stork ones are really sharp and pointy ans I keep them at home. The ones beside it are portable and fit nicely into the case.

The entire right side contains stitch markers. These are used to keep track of stitches or rows by putting a colorful little do-dad on them. My favorites are the orange and turquoise ones at the bottom. They can be clasped around stitches or needles, making them easy to move and adjust. Next to that is a buch of safety pins. These work the same way as the bigger stitch markers, but for smaller pieces. Above that are normal circular marker, which are good when you absolutely do not want a marker to move. The other ones have hardly been used. They've got some really cool charms that I got as part of a yarn swap, but they're a bit cumbersome to use. I still love them though.

The black one is my favorite. It was given to me by the friend who gave me the box and is supposed to ward off evil. There will definitely be projects in my foreseeable future that will be in need of its protection.

Hey! Listen!

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. More like:

Yes, I did spend around an hour in paint making this

That's right! I'm 3d printing an Ocarina. Why: because it's cool, and why not?

But first off: What is an Ocarina?

An ocarina is an old type of handheld vessle flute with four to twelve finger holes with a mouth piece that extends away from the main vessel. They are typically made of ceramic or clay, but can be made out of virtually any material. This old instrument gain new popularity when it featured in the aforementioned nintendo video game.

I was (staying up way too late) and watched KFaceTV's "Zelda Jiggle" video. One of the things that caught my eye was the mock of of the ocarina of time that they used as a prop.
It was pretty cool and I have wanted to get an ocarina ever since first seeing the game, but replica's avaliable online cost form $20-$40, and right now I don't have that money to spare (it's reserved for yarn and books). But what I do have is a place at a school that has a shiny, shiny Makerspace. And that Makerspace has shiny, shiny 3d printers.
I headed over to Thingiverse and found a model for a printable Ocarina. It had plenty of "makes" meaning that a lot of people had printed it, and generally positive reviews. My tip to anyone getting anything from Thingiverse or anywhere like it: check the makes and comments, they will tell you whether or not you will waste your time. After downloading it, I plugged it into our Ultimaker and started the print.

The controls took a bit of getting used to, it's the little dial a the bottom.

As far as I know (I had class and it took 9 hours, longer than the total school day) the top of it printed without a hitch. I came in the next morning and freaked out some middle school kids when I cackled maniacally upon seeing the finished print. All I had to do was yank out the supports and I had the top half of my Ocarina. The bottom was not so easy. After starting it in the morning I cam back around lunch and found two bases (the initial layer of plastic) on the table, meaning that something had screwed up and the teacher had restarted the print. I checked the one in the printer and AI YAH! As far as I could tell, the extruder had somehow caught on the supports in the center and dragged it out, meaning that it was now just extruding into open space when it made the supports. This had also resulted in a bunch of little bubbles and strands popping out of the main print. I stopped the printer and reset it, but the extruder was jammed so I had to run the print till plastic started coming out then stop it, quickly clear the print bed, and restart it. When I left school it seemed to be alright, but we'll see on monday. Still, it's pretty cool.

If you want to check out more 3d printing issues both cool and crazy take a look at "The Art of 3D Print Failure" on flicker.
https://www.flickr.com/groups/3d-print-failures/

Oh boy...

It's fun! Everyone loves unwinding and restarting a project! Everyone! I'm telling you, THEY LOVE IT OK, AND SO DO I! (distressed panting dissolving into over exaggerated sobbing). It hurts, why me? Why? What did I do to make life this painful?

Even the baby from the internet is confused and upset.

But in all seriousness unwinding is one of the worst parts of knitting. It isn't that bad when it's only a couple of rows, a couple of stitches is even better. Actually, undoing stitches without ever taking the piece off of the needles is called "tinking" because you are knitting backwards. But there are times when tinking will just take too long. When this happens it's time to slide the stitches off the kneedles and pull the yarn. to yank out the rows. This is a step that scares many new knitters.

Yes, this is a knitted version of the scream.

The main worry I've heard is "what if I can't stop at the right point?" The answer: you re-do any extra stitches that you take out, and you slow down when you get close to your stopping point.

This is all well and good, but what about an entire project? 

That hurts. It's painful to do, and to decide.

Context time:

I made the decision approximately halfway through the test knit of a pattern to unwind the entire thing and redesign it. Nothing major, I simply wasn't happy with an element of it. That element happened to be at the very beginning of the piece. After fighting with myself I figured out that I wouldn't be satisfied if I didn't go back and rework this thing. So I began to unwind it, rolling the yarn back onto the ball. Now I've restarted it, and I'm redesigning that part. I'm glad I did it, because I'd rather have to do some extra work and have something that I like, than slack off and be disappointed...it still kind of sucked though.

Arkham Incoming

The Batman Arkham series is one of the greatest superhero games ever. As more information has been coming out about the upcoming Arkham knight fan theories have been rampant as to the plot, the gadgets, and-most of all-the identity of the "Arkham Knight" (my money's on Hush).

The games themselves have great graphics with a diverse colour palette and detail put into every one of the characters. One would think that choosing a character to base a pattern on would be very difficult, but it actually wasn't. For me, the choice was obvious.

Take a guess before you scroll down.

IT WAS NOT JOKER!

I'm going to estimate that at least half of everybody thought it would be the "clown prince of crime." Ask a person to think of a batman villain, and they will say Joker. He's iconic. The antithesis to Batman, and played brilliantly by Mark Hamill. But Joker's been in everything! He's the main villain in Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, and ultimately (spoiler alert) Arkham Origins.

Asylum

City Suffering from the aftereffects of the Titan formula

Origins (Voiced by Troy Baker)

I don't know about you, but I've had enough of Joker (if he's the Arkham Knight I will do something drastic). It would seem that the developer has as well, as the Arkham Knight trailer seemed to indicate that Scarecrow would be the central villain.

YES! YES! YES!

It's actually difficult to express in intelligible words how awesome this is. Scarecrow is actually one of my favorite comic book villains period (and not because he was played by Cillian Murphy in Batman Begins). 

But can we all admit that the man is brilliant?

His whole MO of playing on peoples' fear was taken to another level in Asylum when the game seemed to crash as a result of his fear toxin in a crazy psycho-mantis-esque mind bending bit of brilliance by Rocksteady. Then there was the entire crazy part following that including the literally larger than life villain. It's one of the screwiest sequences, and on top of that is just plain cool.

Batman's that tiny figure by the wall on the left.

Scarecrow is an underappreciated villain. Sure, Joker's unpredictable, but this guy uses people's own minds against them. This opens up so many options, especially in an interactive medium like video games. The aforementioned Psychomantis became iconic because he seemed to be able to reach out of the screen and mess with the player directly rather than through a character. If the trailer is anything to go by, he's going to be terrorizing the whole of Gotham city, creating more obstacles (avoiding fear-toxin, dealing with civillians losing it). Arkham Knight is going to be the final part of the Arkham series, and after changing the face of freeflow combat games by mixing in both stealth and horror, it's definitely a series that has to go out with a bang, and Scarecrow is the right villain to use. So bravo and thank you Rocksteady.

Never try to raster off a layer of paint (and other realizations)

I started this week with a brilliant plan. It failed.

One of the planned designs I have is based on the character Dante from the Devil May Cry series. When promotional art started coming out for the 2013 reboot this picture was a part of it.

and everyone went crazy over the hair colour

I though it would be a pretty good one to base a picture of the final product on, so I decided that I would attempt to replicate the police board/sign/thingy that he's holding.
I found a suitable piece of wood and painted it black. I was planning on using the laser cutter at my school to raster away the text. After I had put on the second coat of paint I had a stroke of brilliance. I could use a layer of white paint under a layer of black paint. It was, of course, too late at that point, so I decided to let the paint dry, use this as a test, and use the other side as a final product.
Through trial, but mostly error, I found out that I could raster away a layer of paint. So by Thursday, I had the other side of the board ready, black paint with a layer of white underneath. I put it in the laser cutter, loaded in my pattern, hit "GO". ...................................................................and realized that it was turned the wrong way.
I rotated the board, started again, waited for an interminable amount of time, only to find that the top layer of paint hadn't come off-I'd have to run it again. I went to put the board back in, only to realize I hadn't marked where I'd placed it. This meant I had to approximate, leading to a misplaced engraving. After trying a few more times to get it back in the right place, and to simply rub off the paint after the first raster I gave up. I threw the board away, ranted about being done with "life, the universe, everything" and went back to lunch.

For the knitted product itself, I was going to use Yarn Carnival Fire Dancer in the colorway 1832 degrees along with another yarn in a darker toast color.

Pretty, isn't it?

But then I realized; I don't have the money to but both skeins of yarn right now. Oy.

But I have other designs that I can work on, so we'll just have to wait and see what catches my eye at Hill Country Weavers.