DUBB CHUNKS & SCALES

I am trying to balance my time between NLMH knitting and CASTL CRNRS knitting. The Hooliganship costume development has been a lot of thinking, emailing, photo-texting, blogging and Skype-ing. Peter is in Europe on a solo tour until December, and Christopher is on tour with Mirah for the next two and a half weeks. I suppose that shouldn't matter too much since we already do not live in the same city.

The photos here relate to one idea that has surfaced in the last month. Something like...scaly skin, decomposing, pre-historic human survivalist with the warmth and comfort of a huge and heavy body scarf. The scales are knit with a fine cotton, some in plain jersey and some in subtle textures. The body scarf swatch was knit with an un-ravelled three-ply cotton rope from the hardware store, by hand with poles.

There are plans for both of these techniques to experiment with dyeing, tye-dying, over-dyeing, bleaching etc. I am particularly interested in attempting some home marling with the rope by dyeing each of the three segments a different color for a less space-dye like variegation.

The looming question that still remains, is where to put those L.E.D's...

COZY JOY

Things I have been working on:
Machine knitting, hand knitting, knitting with rope, knitting with l.e.d's, multi-color tuck stitches, weaving stitches, multi-color full needle rib, fairisle, intarsia and so on.

Here is Joy, cozy and ready for winter, donning fruits of recent labor.
Nearly all of Joy's outfit was created on the knitting machine with cotton and acrylic yarns. The dress she is wearing underneath the sweater was made last winter and crawled out of the closet this morning.

The head wrap is the Brother Banner shown in a recent post, knit with pre-programmed patterns. The sweater is my first full-sized cardigan, knit with a series of computer manipulated letters. The bicycle shorts are knit with 50/50 stripes in a new 4-ply cotton yarn that I purchased at a yard sale that never ends in Lakeville. The shorts were also my introduction to 2x2 rib, racking and half-pitching on the ribber bed. Additionally, the pattern for the shorts was transposed from a flat pattern I had drafted long ago by calculating the number of courses and wales (stitches horizontally and vertically) to equal the measurements of the flat pattern in inches. The dress is not pictured very well, but has box pleats around the entire waist, a built-up neckline and dome sleeves. It is made from a light-weight printed twill that I bought at Savers.