My Funny Valentine, Sweet Knitted Valentine

I try to ignore Valentine's Day. Mine have, frankly, always sucked. The only one I ever got to celebrate with anyone was in 1992, when I got a card. From a guy who a) turned out to be gay and b) when I found out about his actual sexual orientation and reproached him for not telling me, claimed I'd just imagined that we were ever romantically involved. So maybe that card doesn't count, because it just might have been a figment of my imagination too. All my other Valentine's Days have just been non-events, with the possible exception of Valentine's Day 2012, when I was coming home late from work and got hit by a car. The driver was a young guy on the way to see his girlfriend. I don't imagine they had too pleasant an evening either, even after he eventually arrived at her place a few hours late.

But I'm not going to ignore Valentine's Day on this blog, because I do love researching and writing holiday theme posts (I'm even looking forward to creating a St. Patrick's Day post), and in this post I offer a bouquet of knitting project ideas to you that I hope you can enjoy regardless of your romantic status. Knitting, after all, is inherently a self-sufficient activity, and you can make one or two of these items for yourself or for someone whom you love, and you'll find it won't matter whether you love them in a romantic, platonic, or familial way — they'll appreciate the item and your efforts just as much.

A number of these projects employ hearts as a design element. I don't normally like heart motifs as they tend to look cheesy and too child-like for adult wear, but in these cases they've been incorporated into the pattern with such intricacy, cuteness, or attitude that they all work.

The above picture is the first of the project ideas I'm suggesting. It says it all, doesn't it? If you think it doesn't, you can always replace the text with something else (e.g., "Prenup Okay?", "Trading You In", "Now You Tell Me" or "Expletive Deleted"). The pattern is available for sale on Domiknitrix.com for $2(USD).

Seeing a little kid run around the house in the LoveSocks, designed by Devon Clement, would make my day. It's a free pattern.

Beautifully designed Coeur D'Or, by Heatherly Walker. If they look too much like Valentine's Day wear to you, just make them in another colourway. This pattern is available for $6(USD).

Love these Heart mittens, by Matilde Skår. Making these mittens in different colours would make them all-winter wear. It's a free pattern.

Here's a Valentine Envelope, by Cindy Craft, that could be used from year to year. Or if you make it in some other colourway, it could be a nice vanity case. The pattern is available for $2(USD).

Gorgeous, intricate Little Valentine shawl pattern, by Sylvie Beez, and apparently it takes less than one 100g skein of fingering yarn to make it. It's a free pattern.

This Lucy's Chemise Nightie, by Joan McGowan-Michael, is a romance in itself. The pattern is available for $8(USD) at White Lies Designs.

Lace stockings for the woman who has a fetish/love affair with awesome hosiery. The Marlaina Thigh-High Stockings design, by Joan McGowan-Michael, is available for $7.50(USD) at White Lies Designs, where all the designs are romantic — the whole site is worth checking out if you like a touch of that style in your wardrobe.

And if you need a lift today, here's a story a friend of mine told me last year to make me feel better. One year back in his university days, he had no money to spend on buying flowers for his girlfriend, so he decided to make her a bouquet of paper flowers. He stayed up most of the night, cutting and pasting. The next day when he presented his girlfriend with the flowers, she looked puzzled, reluctantly accepted the flowers, and said, "I didn't know we were going out."

This story does indeeed cheer me up whenever I think of it. Even I have never experienced a burn like that one.

Oh, Deer

A reader named Karen (thanks Karen!) enlightened me as to the existence of a fornicating deer motif pattern on Ravelry. It was designed by Anne Rutten, and is available as a free download here. It has really added considerably to the joy of my holidays to see that, as of this writing, the motif has or is being used in 1380 projects on Ravelry. Most of the projects are hats, but there are also socks, scarves, and a few sweaters. Here are a few pictures.

I especially love that there are Christmas stars shining down over the deer in three of these.

If you don't celebrate Christmas but procreating animals are your thing, you might want to check out some of the other naughty animal motifs on Ravelry: there are cows (for the Black Angus farmer convention), kangaroos (for that trip to Australia), elephants (for that relative in Africa), penguins (for that expedition to the South Pole), bunnies (for Easter), and unicorns (for that friend of yours who really likes unicorns).

Knitty Deep Fall 2012: A Review

I will always love the online knitting magazine Knitty for what I consider to be their most outstanding design of all time.

Yes, that's a thong knitted out of red licorice, and I hope you aren't reading this at work. The pattern is here, and apparently can be adjusted to fit any consenting adult.

Knitty peaked with that design (where can you go once you've designed a thong knitted of licorice?), but let's have a look at their Deep Fall 2012 issue anyway.

This "Best Friends Forever Cowl" is far from the worst way there is to indicate your BFF status with another person. (That would have to be those idiotic half-a-heart necklaces I saw a few of back in the eighties.) The idea for this cowl is that you each knit two of the same colour, swap one, and then graft them together. As long as you choose colours that really work together you'll still want to wear the resulting cowl after you and your BFF have had a hair-pulling match over something stupid and gone your separate ways.

I like this shawl, or at least I think I do — I wish I could see it better in this picture. I'm not sure such a beautiful and intricate lace design needs to be all those different colours, or at least not those particular colours. That may just be my bias against my least-favourite colour (yellow), and against making extremely time-intensive accessories in colourways that only work with a few of your outfits.

I keep thinking this sweater looks like something I would make for a film student because those bands across the chest look just like strips of film to me. (And yes, a film student probably wouldn't want to wear anything so obvious.) The garish colour combination of this sweater bothers me, and the buttons, but that's purely a matter of personal preference. This sweater would look fine knitted in either a bold colourway or in something more subtle, such as in black and white and a few shades of gray.

Mmmm, fair isle. It's so refined by hundreds of years of time and tradition that you almost can't go wrong with it.

This is perfect. I've bookmarked this one and it will be the next sweater I make for my father.

I can't get on board with cardigans that don't fasten in the front even though they're ubiquitous now. I imagine them constantly hanging unattractively open and getting into things, such as my meals. From the way this model has her arm barred across her midriff, I suspect the front of this sweater doesn't stay becomingly wrapped on its own.

Men's sweater design in general suffers from a lack of imagination. As one of my nephews has complained, "They always have the stripe across the chest." It's not entirely the fault of menswear designers, because they have to stick to what sells and so many men really don't want to wear anything the least bit unusual. So here we have a sweater with stripes across the chest, but they're a different kind of stripe from what you usually see, and it actually looks like something fresh and striking. I like this one and think most of the relatively lean men I know under 45 or so would like it. I am not sure about the hoodie, though. I wish there were a back view of it because in this picture it looks like it was tacked on as an afterthought.

I love the concept of a modern-day knitted middy — I love modern versions of iconic fashions — but I don't like the execution of this one. Making the entire item in garter stitch just makes the sweater look like a beginner knitter's first sweater. Mixing it up with some other stitches and techniques, such as a collar and cuffs of stockinette stitch or a finished crochet edging, might have given this sweater a little more style and polish.

Now this is how you design with colour blocking.

These are cute and very well-designed. For the macabre, death-obsessed freak in your life, and don't we all have at least one?

This particular colour combination wouldn't be for everyone, but these are inventive and a good way to use up small amounts of complementary yarn.

I know in comparison to the slaughter house of misery and human cost and the flagrantly inhumane disregard for their own soldiers on the part of the British Army's administration that was the Crimean War, the Balaclava cap probably looked like a good idea. I'm aware that the soldiers who were expected to endure temperatures well below freezing in cotton summer uniforms without shelter or even a blanket would have received the issue of these caps with cries of "THANK GOD ALMIGHTY, SOMETHING TO KEEP MY FROZEN, BLACKENED EARS FROM FALLING OFF!!!!"

But it's well over a century and a half later and for those of us who have been privileged enough not to experience the discovery of a maggot-infested horse carcass in our only water supply or amputation without anesthesia, the balaclava has never been an attractive option.

Adorable! And the hat is cute too. Let's get a closer look at the baby, shall we? Purely so we can see the detail on the hat.

I like the colour patchwork. It's fun and, upon a quick look at the pattern, would be quite painless to work.

The designer of this hat and fingerless glove pattern writes that she always loved playing with prisms in science class as a child and that she wanted to use this yarn and design to recreate the effect. And I must say she has succeeded. This is a very effective use of this very pretty yarn.

I'm not sure I can be fair to these fingerless gloves. I just want to say they're okay, but would look much nicer as real gloves.

But then I'm unreasonably annoyed by this picture and the text that accompanies it. (A quote: "Twisted Mom Sandy Sitzman sat on the stone steps of an ancient temple ruin in Crete, took a skein of her handspun out of her bag and placed it on the stone to summon her muse, Calertne. Magically the colors in her yarn began to sing to the columns, the stone, the tumbling shapes. The goddess answered and these bodacious fingerless gloves were born.") And I don't know why it was necessary for the model to have an egg sitting in her lap, but perhaps it's an obscure reference to that whole goddess thing.

Since I commented on fingerless gloves in an earlier post it's been pointed out to me that for people such as sailors and construction workers who work outdoors in all weathers, or even people who have to play the piano or type indoors but in a work space that is too chilly for comfort, fingerless gloves are a good solution for keeping the hands warm but dexterous, and to this I readily agree. I do remain unconvinced that there is any possible temperature or work environment that requires fingerless gloves on the hands when the same person's feet are apparently perfectly comfortable in flip-flops.

And I note that my spell check is not recognizing the word "fingerless". Make of that what you will.