Live long and prosper

I made a Seamless Nintendo DS Lite Sock as a belated Mother’s Day gift for my mom.  She started out playing Tetris on the original Nintendo Gameboy my brother and I bought as kids and now owns a few versions of the newer Gameboys.     

I modeled the cozy after Spock’s uniform since my mom is also a Star Trek fan.  The yarn is Red Heart Super Saver in Country Blue and the felt Starfleet insignia was copied from an illustration of the Starfleet insignias from Danhausertrek.com.   The site is dedicated to the the Animated Series, so I’m not sure if it is completely accurate to Star Trek: The Original Series. 

I couldn’t find gold felt at the craft store, but they did have this bright yellow.  I’m not sure how well the craft felt will hold up to heavy use; it felt a little flimsy.  There’s another layer of felt under the insignia to plump it up and hopefully reinforce the applique. 

  

The DS Lite Sock pattern is double knit, which means you cast on a certain number of stitches on straight needles and knit the front and back at the same time.  I was confused with the directions to start since it doesn’t actually spell this fact out to you.  Once I understood the idea of double knitting, the whole project turned out to be very easy.  You only need to know knit, purl and the slip stitch to work this cozy. 

The gauge is pretty tight with worsted weight yarn and small needles.  The pattern estimates needing size 6 needles but I ended up using size 2s.  Possibly I’m a loose knitter?  Also, I had to restart a couple times because the smaller needles were harder for me to use.  With the right gauge, the sock fits really nicely and there are no seams to sew. 

*That’s cool* a random fact

The Vulcan Nerve Pinch was invented by Leonard Nimoy as a way for Spock to overpower opponents without having to resort to violence.

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Neither rain nor sleet

I finished the knit boucle scarf for my mom.  Even though the pattern was very simple it took a lot longer to make than I’m used to.  There are more stitches to the inch compared to crochet and being a slow knitter doesn’t exactly speed things along. 

When I did finally finish the knitting I still wanted to embroider something simple in the corner.  After deciding on a treble clef, I put an image through knitPro to get one of those nifty graphs.  Originally, I intended to try out the duplicate stitch technique but the Caron SS yarn was fatally hidden by the boucle.  Those little tufts of yarn buried my best attempts. 

Since the duplicate stitch didn’t look right, I tried the back stitch.  Even with two strands together all that fuzzy boucle still got in the way, so I finally came to the conclusion that the crochet slip stitch was my only option.   

The slip stitches turned out to be just what I was looking for.  The only downfall is you have to free hand a bit more than the embroidery (exactly the reason I put it off).  The extra effort was worth it, though.  The slip stitch made the curves look much nicer than the embroidery and the raised effect makes the insignia really pop. 

My favorite part of the slip stitch technique is the opposite side.  Since I wove the ends in back through the treble clef, the backside doesn’t look that much different from the front.  See the gray yarn outline through the back?   

This scarf was made just in time, too.  We got four inches of snow yesterday and then a few more today.  What’s weird is that it snows during the night and early morning and then it’s really warm and sunny during the day.

During the day, on account of the warm weather, the snow trapped on tree branches melt off randomly in clumps.  It sounds like it’s raining all around in short, heavy bursts – defintely an auditory experience.  Plus, every once in a while when I was under a tree (hard not to do around here) I got smacked in the head with an ‘organic’ snowball courtesy of Mother Nature.  

*That’s cool* a random fact

The treble clef is also known as the G clef because one end circles around the ‘G line’.

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