Tag: design

Fancypants neck brace, a knitting pattern

sarah

knitted neck brace, ready to be stamped on a coin

The first neck brace scarf was so quick that I was inspired to make another one. Usually I’m all about elaborate crafts that involve at least a year of delayed gratification, which I think makes me very vulnerable to the finished-object high. More more more!

I probably could have stopped before adding the fuzzy ruffle thing, but I wanted to make it weird. My vision was jellyfishy, but unless jellyfishes have a European royal court I’m not sure that really comes through. More of a bizarro-Elizabethan neck brace.

Here’s a snapshot through a dirty mirror that shows the front, and also, incidentally, a quite accurate representation of my personal idea of what I look like.

knitted neck brace, dirty mirror, self image

The creature itself looks like this.

neck brace laid out

Some patterns for knitting one.

  • Knit a long triangle. The decreases don’t have to be evenly placed.
  • I used random-width welts to make the fabric firm enough to stand up. (Alternating stockinette and reverse stockinette stitch.)
  • The main piece used about 50g of worsted weight yarn (one thrifted ball), on 4.5mm needles.
  • The ruffle took a few yards of mohair-esque stuff (again, thrifted and unlabelled) on 5.5mm… could have used much fatter needles for an airier ruffle.
  • I tried it on to place the buttons (actually a long cufflink-thing made out of two pearl beads and some embroidery floss), and to mark the start and end of the ruffle.

knitted neck brace / hall of mirrors

Purple neck brace, a knitting pattern

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heroic knitting moment

I made this neck warmer in one afternoon, with no counting. Hooray! It even ended up with half a Darth Vader collar that I like, and made a couple dents in my crafting stash. Time for heroic poses in the bathroom mirror.

I was remembering this tapered neckwarmer and this scarflink (scroll to Oct 27, 2002) while I knitted.

It looks like this on its own, if you want to make something similar.

knitted neck brace laid out

This pattern is such a non-pattern that I insist on writing it formally, because it is funny.

Materials

  • 100g (60m) of thick and thin wool
  • 12mm needles
  • 2 buttons and thread

Pattern

CO 22 sts.

Work in garter stitch, decreasing one at each end of random rows (approximately every 4-6 rows), down to 2 sts. K2tog.

Pull yarn through remaining stitch and leave the tail hanging out as a fastener.

Weave in the cast on end.

Sew or tie the two buttons together to make a cuff-link type thing. Button it into the outside layer of the scarf and wrap the tail around it to fasten. (Move or flip the button at will.)

The end.

reversible buttons for a scarf

All the ingredients have stories. Past projects, hand-me-downs, gifts, inheritances. That feels good.

Persepolis, surprises, posting to the future

sarah

This year’s Mystery Movie surprise screening at Cinecenta was Persepolis! I’d never been before, but the idea is that they screen something anticipated that hasn’t been released over here yet. Our only guess was that it might be that crazy Bob Dylan movie with multiple people trading the lead role… and then as soon as we had any kind of guess, I was worried that when we were wrong it would be disappointing. Surprises are fragile.

Seeing the film come up in black and white animation was so optimal that it felt sort of charming. This was the only upcoming movie I’ve been looking forward to, and almost the only one I even knew anything about. It’s hard to be more fun than anticipation, but I don’t think that accomplishment was the charming part. A guy from the Cinecenta staff had come out and introduced the screening beforehand, so already it was feeling like a human social event rather than a commercial transaction, and then it turned out to be a movie made by people I could picture in my head from watching the little making of feature on the movie website. Lots of people involved, rather than only vague forces of fame and culture and money. I think that was what felt so warm and fuzzy. (Maybe especially after considering a movie about Bob Dylan as a sort of opaque, unknowable icon?)

I don’t understand why more cinemas don’t put an effort into spectacles and gimmicks like this on a regular basis. Surprise movies (old or new) are going on my local cinema wishlist, along with having a human introduce each screening, offering table seating, downloadable mp3 commentary tracks, loveseat-style seating in more places than just the back row of The Roxy, and beer in non-plastic containers.

I’m not much for movie reviews, but I suppose I should mention that I liked Persepolis. Funny parts, sad parts, angry parts, cute parts, and a lot of characters processing ethics out loud, and integrating external wars and politics with internal, personal feelings. The animation was very beautiful. (And boy do I like the various Arabic Persian nose shapes that Satrapi draws.) I think you could check out the books and the movie in any order without wrecking anything.

This whole episode has been a curious test of my 7-day posting lag. When I realized which film was showing, I felt like I’d been hoarding information because none of my companions could read the future archives of my blog, where I’d stashed links and details about the movie. That’s exactly counter to my anti-exclusive motives for posting to the future. And then I felt disappointed that I wanted to write a follow-up post when the first thing I wrote about Persepolis might be due to publish less than a week in the future— my follow-up was at risk of being weirdly late. It turned out to be pretty well-timed after all, but it is hilarious the way media influences real life reactions. This is more disconcerting than the “I wish I’d brought my camera / Kodak moment” feeling.

Future, novelty, anti-competition

sarah

I’m currently posting at least seven days in the future, and I kind of dig it. At first, I just wanted to post a couple of things that would pop up on December 1, to give myself a deadline for building the new site templates. But now I like this restriction, that everything must lag by at least a week. It eliminates some kinds of elitism and exclusivity— I can’t be first, I can’t be fastest, I can’t be in the loop. Blogs are such a pro-novelty, pro-immediacy, pro-echo-chamber technology that putting a mandatory delay in there is interesting to me. And funny. It already makes the site seem strangely private, because I can see into its future and go there alone.

Red and blue, glass and shoes

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Smashed glass and stripey shoes, originally uploaded by dreadfuldan.

When I wore mary janes a lot, I used to be into the toes turned in thing. This photo is suddenly making me uncomfortable about it, presented like that with no irony at all regarding women in fancy shoes standing like little girls. I’m hoping my general hairiness was enough to contrast and balance the baby toes.

I had never related the toes to the shoes until last week. I noticed that when I wear my boots I tend to stand like Captain America, feet planted especially wide. Design affordance, I guess. Superhero boots afford superhero stances.

About this new design

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I feel like a bit of a wanker talking about My New Website Design since the point for me is to be self-explanatory (I already talked about this stuff by posting the design). But I do like talking about design in regular words too, so here goes.

  • The monster’s name is Pearl. That takes some pressure off.
  • Mouthful of words.
  • Guts out.
  • Memento mori in general, and in specific.
  • These colours make me want to work.
  • The monster is modelled after the radiator that faces our toilet.

Toilet monster

  • There are more hiding throughout the apartment.

Hey you.

Snacks: a last holdout against globalization

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I just spent two weeks in Scotland and England with my mum. It was lots of fun, but I was a little disappointed in how similar everything was to home.

When I was in Europe in 2003, the fashion was so far ahead I could only point and laugh, and there were always some obvious local specialties. In Holland, every pub had Heineken and Grolsch on tap, as you’d expect. Bars in Granada served free tapas with every drink; bars in Barcelona didn’t.

On this trip, we had to hunt and hunt to find anything we couldn’t get in Vancouver. There were more people dressed fashionably, but the frontiers of fashion were set in approximately the same places as they are here.

I made my mum take a highway exit twice so that I could get another fleeting glimpse of some highland cattle, because they were so hard to find. Despite spotting millions of sheep in the countryside, we were hard pressed to find any non-tourist shops selling local woolens. Do Scottish people ignore their huge wool harvest, or do they just wear the dumb tourist sweaters? It was frustrating.

Right after my mum and I had been sort of lamenting that globalization had made travel more boring, we stopped to buy some snacks for the trip to the next place. I remembered all the weird chips and candy I’d hoarded in Eastern Europe, and made a trip down the “crisps and biscuits” aisle.

Gold!

Walker's Lamb and Mint Flavour Crisps

Nobby's Nuts

The green V logo in the corner of the next one means “suitable for vegetarians.”

Bacon Streakies

Besides the snack differences, the UK might be the world headquarters for design that uses an object to replace a letter in its own name. Every mention of Italy used the boot for the L; every fish shop’s name was spelled with a fish… every package of bacon streakies had a little bacon streaky for an I. So there’s that.

Affordance

sarah

Instantly I am excited to write here in the mornings. I’m not finished the template design yet, but I think the two stripes are the key players. Having my new favourite colour scheme in the house makes me want to represent.

Today

sarah

I started my weekend on Friday, and spent all of today goofing around with Rock Club, and Zoe is coming to visit tomorrow so I know that will be a write-off. I can’t separate my slacking from my fever-induced laziness. I want to be so productive, and not get stuck on predictable tasks, like whenever I have to do the part of design that involves making something pretty, or presentable. I rock the functional part, but the decorating is really hard. Yes I know they work together. I’m stuck on visual stuff on two different projects right now. Three, really. It’s painful. I’m so full of ideas, honest. I can work so hard. Honest. I don’t know how to make the pretty things come out of my head.

This has to be the year that I learn to draw. Studying colours and type and alignment helped, but if I’m aspiring to something other than boxes, I need to have less clumsy hands.