I tied the knot and moved half-way across the country to Nebraska and thanks to my amazing new group of knitting friends at the Wooly Mammoth, I stayed excited and supported as I tried new things.

Brief Emotional Interlude: Knitting groups have become crucial to my social well-being whenever I move to a new city. When I moved to NE, I was all of a sudden very far from my close-knit (pun intended!) family, having left my zookeeping job that I’d passionately loved for 10 years, was starting grad school and admittedly was butting heads with my adviser. My knitting group was a supportive, pre-assembled social group of diverse women (and occasionally men)  that I admired and in which I could immerse myself. It helped ground me and give me perspective.

When we moved to Arkansas 2 years later, visiting The Yarn Mart (sadly closing summer 2017), and finding out about their knitting group was one of the first things I did.

Each subsequent project I undertook gave me a new skill and pushed the area of the  “patterns Sara loves and can conceivably attempt” intersection of the Venn diagram ever larger. I had a growing tool box and a library of mental instruction books now.

Not-so-emotional, but similarly important interlude: Watching an online class about how to recognize and fix mistakes was one of the most important things I did to move me forward! With crochet you can rip back with ease and you only ever have to worry about ripping back too far by one row, but with knitting it felt so precarious- like if you sneezed your entire piece would instantly fall into a jumbled morass of tangled yarn. Once I understood how knitting was constructed I could stop panicking at a dropped stitch, and could find my place on a chart by reading the  stitches on my work.

I’m a geek to the very core. I’ve always been an avid reader and I adore Jane Austen, Narnia, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, science, wildlife and the fashion and movies of the 1920’s-1940’s, to name a few. They make up part of my mental and emotional “nest”- where I am happiest and most comfortable.

During the travails that would become my master’s field research debacle, aka the Swift Fox collars from Hades, I decided that I wanted to make a HP-themed baby blanket for a fellow Harry Potter-loving friend who was expecting.

I’d recently contributed a square for a blanket my knitting group collectively made for the Wooly Mammoth’s owner for her birthday. It was one of those knit and purl charts that makes a textured design/ picture, often used as dishcloths. So with that in mind I found a bunch of HP charts on Ravelry and knitted a 3×3 square blanket for my friend that turned out really cute.

As is often the case with knitters, it isn’t until we’ve made multiple massive projects for others that we actually stop and make something for ourselves (I made approximately 26 items for Christmas 2014 presents but that is a tale for another day….) I decided I wanted to make a larger version of the blanket for myself and use all of the different charts I’d found.  

The (only)problem with Ravelry is that you are spoiled for choice! Once I started gathering HP charts I found Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc….. And then <trumpet fanfare> I stumbled onto the double-knit square patterns from the site “Lattes and Llamas” and their amazing Geek-along blankets! For the last couple of years, they’ve been doing knit-alongs, with a new pattern released each week and by the end of the year you have a freakin’ sweet blanket! Their patterns were amazing and those started seeping into my planning phase. But now half of my patterns were originally knit/purl and half double-knit. I toyed with the idea of knitting the Lattes and Llamas charts as just knit/purl designs, but the amazing color contrasts of the double-knit squares made me desperately want my blanket to be all double knitted! And OH! how squishy awesome the final blanket would be!

So… having never double knitted a thing in my life I embarked on a 36-square (6 x 6) king sized blanket- all geek/ fandom designs.  No testing the water with my toes, I just belly-flopped in. (And incidentally had to rip out and re-start my first square about 3 times before I actually understood what I was doing and had it looking semi-decent.)

About half of the squares, for what I officially dubbed my “Mantle of Fierce Majesty”, came from Lattes and Llamas.A few others I gleaned as free charts on Ravelry that I could adjust to be the same size and for the rest I decided to make my own.

I love the show “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries”. Brazenly humorous Australian flapper detectives is where it is at! But of course no one had made a chart for that show so I tried my hand at sketching the outline of her infamous 1920’s bob haircut on graph paper and made my own. Then a couple of other fandoms that I love came to mind but didn’t have charts or they were the wrong size so I scoured Google for decal images or silhouettes of those items and uploaded them to the pattern generator on Stitchboard.com, limiting the size of the output chart to the width of all the other squares.  Sometimes they came out perfectly the first time, sometimes I had to finagle them a little to get them to fit and to look right (like the added tooth details on the above chart) but I had my first taste of finding and using the tools needed to make my finished product exactly what I envisioned it to be….  

And 18 months later the Mantle was indeed Fierce in its finished Majesty, all 198,720 stitches worth (not including the seaming)!

Afterward: my cat loved The Mantle so much that it had to be put in the closet when not in use because watching her knead and pull strands out of my 18 months of hard work could not be tolerated- no matter how cute Lady Mosi Fezziwig is….