Knitted Things

One of the cool things about Tinys is that you can easily make them into different things like ornaments, pins, or jewelry. Check out this Tiny Gnome ring I made yesterday!

It’s really easy to do. I just made a knitted band out of the yarn I had leftover from knitting my gnome. For my medium-sized finger, I cast on 24 sts onto size 1 DPNS and worked a k1, p1 rib for 3 rounds, then bound off the stitches.

I used the loose ends on the band to stitch the gnome on, and now he’s turned into fashion! (He’s pretty proud of himself.) You can do this with pretty much any Tiny pattern—all you have to do is figure out how many stitches you need to cast on for the band.

If you make a Tiny ring, be sure to sure a photo in the Mochimochi Friends Flickr group so we can all see!

I recently started working on a toilet design, because Tubby the bathtub needs a friend! I hadn’t given it much thought before, but it turns out that toilets are much more complex than bathtubs, what with the bowl and the tank and everything in between.

To figure out the design, I started by sketching what I think a toilet looks like. Then, I did a Google image search to see what actual toilets look like. (Yes, I was too lazy to walk across my apartment to the bathroom and look at my own toilet.) Then it was back to the notebook for more sketching. Maybe because I’m not so skilled with a pencil, my technique is slapdash: basically, doodle toilets over and over again until I begin to like what I see.

Here you see I’ve finished knitting a bowl, and I’m trying to decide how to do the rest of it. I’m happy to say that I finished up my toilet over the weekend, but—oh no!—not before seeing Katie Boyette’s blog post about the knitted toilet in her upcoming book, More Knitwits!

Katie’s design is pretty genius (especially because it seems to solve the balance problem perfectly), but I’d rather not have my project go down the toilet just because she had the idea too. Surely there is room in the knitting world for more than one toilet, right? Plus, Katie’s super cool and she seems OK with my going ahead with it.

I still have some little bits to finish up with my design, then it will take a while to create the pattern. (It’s not as complex as Grouchy Couch, but it comes close…) If all goes well, Flushie the Toilet will be out and about in a few months!

Remember the colorful mochis I was knitting for a new art piece that’s going up in the Lion Brand Studio in August? I’ve continued knitting them in whenever I find some time—between other projects, when I watch TV, or go to knitting groups. I think their numbers are really climbing, although I don’t have an exact count right now because some are still in Berlin from being in my last show. (They were playing the part of asteroids on the 26-foot-long asteroid belt.) Soon, I’ll have to figure out exactly what I want to do with them!

It’s interesting how my eyes find patterns in the colors when I just dump them out of the bag I keep them in and let them fall randomly.

For the piece, which will be more or less two-dimensional and will hang on a wall, I’ll make sure they all have noses and are all face up (though their bodies will be oriented in all different directions), but how to arrange them? I originally planned to keep it as a big random bunch, although lately I like the idea of shaping the mass into a longer curve that has some movement.

There’s a big part of me that wants to add some really big mochis to the crowd, and have them be performing some action like eating the smaller ones or something. But I kind of want to challenge myself to keep it abstract.

I hope to add many more mochis in the next few months; with enough of them, some could act as a base layer, and others could kind of float on top. I think this would add a lot of depth and interest. (I tried a bit of that in the photo below, but I don’t think it really comes through in the image.)

Here’s another quick arrangement, this time by size, with the biggest in the middle and the smallest on the outside.

Even though this now feels like a pretty silly project that I took on, knitting hundreds of these little guys one by one, it also feels like I’m stretching my brain in a good way to figure out something to do with them that is worth the time that I’ve put into making them. I have about two and a half more months to make up my mind.

I should also mention that this knitting madness is made possible by the generosity of Koigu, who contributed lots of their beautiful brightly-colored yarn!