Knerd Knitting

Ok, I'll admit it: I'm a nerd. My whole family is nerds. And not in the way that has come to include everything from music enthusiasts to old movie buffs to knitters. Those are geeks. We are nerds. Although you can be both, I'm not sure that I qualify as a geek.

My parents met doing a play together at a Science Fiction Convention. I grew up reading as much fantasy and science fiction books as I could get my hands on. My brother has a collection of Magic the Gathering cards that numbers in the thousands. And my husband spends his spare time making Pathfinder RPG characters for kicks and playing tabletop RPGs over the Internet (although that is a bit of a contradiction, I don't know a better way to describe it).

Now, obviously, I am also a devoted knitter. So it is always a pleasure to combine my knitting with my nerdy heritage.

Sometimes, this involves items to help with nerdy activities, and sometimes they are regular items that are decorated in nerdy ways. For the first type, I made a pair of dice bags a few years ago, mostly knit while doing all-day tabletop RPG marathons.

Two dice bags made in 2011

The basic pattern was extremely simple: make a rolled brim hat with two holes on the brim, then fold the brim over and sew it with a drawstring. (Maybe someday I should write up the pattern) When I made these I had already made a few for my college science fiction club raffle, but I don't have any pictures of those.

The first one in this picture has an intarsia boat on it, and is made out of cotton. I knit this while playing 7th Sea, a pirate themed RPG. Since that game uses exclusively 10-sided dice, that is what I keep in there.

The second one in the picture was made out of mostly wool scrap yarn, and has a duplicate stitch picture of a 20-sided die. It's not the best picture I have ever made, but I was pretty pleased with how it came out, given that I made the pattern myself. That's the bag I keep most of my dice in.

A 20-sided die. You can see the resemblance, at least.

I have also made a few bits of clothing here and there that were decorated in nerdy ways. I have showed you the astronomy hat that I made for my husband, and also I briefly mentioned the Jayne Hat that I made for him, as well.

Jayne Hat

If you didn't know, on the show Firefly (of which my husband is a huge fan), a character named Jayne wore a hat like this for a single episode. It was a bit of joke, because he was such a tough-guy character, but he insisted on wearing this ugly, poorly-designed hat because his mom sent it to him. Anyway, because so few episodes were made, fans tend to focus on the tiniest details, and someone wrote a pattern for it. It made a perfect birthday present. I guess it sort of straddles the line between costume and nerd-themed couture, but my husband wears it all the time.

You may be wondering what brought this topic to mind. Well, although I haven't been writing much, I have been furiously knitting away. One of the projects I finished this past month was a pokemon-themed scarf for my brother.

We used to watch the Pokemon show together growing up, and he played the games and collected the cards (I'm not much of a gamer, though). His girlfriend is also a fan, and her birthday was coming up, so he commissioned a scarf that would be reminiscent of her favorite Pokemon, polywhirl:

Well, I started by making two black and white spirals, adapted from Frankie Brown's Double Ten Stitch blanket. Then I added a blue border. This involved a lot of going back and forth (the "rows" were only 8 stitches, 4 white and 4 black), as well as many short-rows for the corners.

Finishing up the first spiral with a band of blue

The black and the white parts were knitted from random scraps of worsted-weight wool that I have been collecting over the years, mostly for making penguin slipper-socks.

The blue, though, was some of the first yarn I ever got. It is from Columbia-Minerva (a company I don't think even exists anymore) and I got it from my mother. She doesn't knit, but she used to crochet. When I was 8 and started to show an interest in knitting, mom went up into the attic and gave me the blue yarn that she had gotten to make a vest with when she still had time to crochet. I had used most of it over the years, but I finally used up most of the last ball making this scarf. The one problem was that, because it had been sitting wound up in the ball so long under tension, it had snapped in parts, so there was a lot of weaving in ends for this project.

Let that be a lesson: long-term storage should be in the skein, or in a loosely wrapped ball.

After I finished the spirals, I knit a plain old blue garter-stitch scarf (I had a short deadline to finish it) and joined the two sides with kitchener stitch.

Polywhirl scarf. Folded a bit in the middle to make it fit in the photo.

I like how the slightly thicker black and white yarn gave the scarf bulging ends. And it does sort of remind me of polywhirl. I wish I had a picture of the recipient wearing it, but all I have is this shot of it folded up and ready to be sent out:

Scarf folded up and ready to gift