Spiderman! Spiderman!
So I am in the midst of my toughest knitting project yet. I've decided to make a Spiderman doll for my now ex-boyfriend. It started off as a going away gift, but now he's gone away and Spidey's still here torturing me. At the suggestion of someone at today's SnB in Solana Beach, I'm going to start documenting the Making of Spiderman.
I took the basic doll pattern from SnB Nation--I thought it would be a piece of cake designing it. I was right about that, but in practice, it's been another story.
First off I made a sketch of what I wanted. I stared at pictures and pictures of Spidey until my eyes burned. Knitting the legs was easy enough, but I think I made them a bit too long.
Next I made the arms. For this I had to teach myself intarsia, the art of knitting with two colors to make a design. Here was my first mistake. I didn't think of how it would look once I sewed the arms to the body, but didn't realize this until too late. More on that later.
Now I had to make the body, which was the hardest. I'm not much of a technical person, so changing my sketch into an actual knit pattern wasn't gonna happen. I decided to just start knitting and see what unraveled. (haha.) I had to unknit and reknit a few times cuz I'd forget to decrease after I changed colors but overall it worked out pretty well. (The arms are sewn on in a raglan style). I kept track of (most of) what I did, so I can make him again if I ever get some masochistic pangs.
It was at this point that I discovered that I didn't make the red stripe on the arm to flow into the red part of the front and back. So I decided to duplicate stitch everything onto the arm. Bad idea. It was too big of an area to look nice and it got really bulky. But I realized this only after I finished both arms. UGHH. So I said fuckit, I'm doing the arms all over again, this time using intarsia. So I knit the two arms only to realize I had made two arms for the right side and completely forgot about reversing the pattern for the left. ARGHHHH!!!! I gave that one to my friend's dog and knit another left arm. So finally I was done with the body.
I used duplicate stitch to put the red spider design on Spidey's back. I actually used a knitting grid to design this one and after 3 or 4 designs I found one that worked and looked really good!
A week ago I used mattress stitch to sew together the arms to the front of the body, and the back of the right arm to the back. I left one side open because now I have to embroider the web.
So I started embroidering the web. I have NO FRICKIN CLUE how to do this. I practiced a bit on one of the spare arms and found something that vaguely looked like a web so I decided to go with that. I first sewed in a thick black thread vertically along every 4th row, in and out of every fourth stitch. Then I started weaving the thread in and out horizontally, trying to get something that looked like a web. I first thought that the webbing should look like U's so that's what I did. After finishing the legs and half of his upper body I realized that they looked like fish scales. I showed it to my mom and she said "It looks like Aquaman!" Fuck. Back to the drawing board. I undid everything and started making the U's more haphazard. I again got through the legs and most of his body when I realized that it still looked like Aquaman. By a complete fluke I put in my needle and thread backwards and realized that I could put just one line inbetween each row. It wouldn't be curved like a web, or like the Spiderman in the comic book, but it looked more like a real spider's web. Huzzah!
And so here I am. I'm about to undo all the webbing again and redo it to look like a janky spiderweb. You've seen those pix of the spiders that they gave different drugs to, right? http://www.trinity.edu/jdunn/spiderdrugs.htm
That's what I'm shooting for.
I took the basic doll pattern from SnB Nation--I thought it would be a piece of cake designing it. I was right about that, but in practice, it's been another story.
First off I made a sketch of what I wanted. I stared at pictures and pictures of Spidey until my eyes burned. Knitting the legs was easy enough, but I think I made them a bit too long.
Next I made the arms. For this I had to teach myself intarsia, the art of knitting with two colors to make a design. Here was my first mistake. I didn't think of how it would look once I sewed the arms to the body, but didn't realize this until too late. More on that later.
Now I had to make the body, which was the hardest. I'm not much of a technical person, so changing my sketch into an actual knit pattern wasn't gonna happen. I decided to just start knitting and see what unraveled. (haha.) I had to unknit and reknit a few times cuz I'd forget to decrease after I changed colors but overall it worked out pretty well. (The arms are sewn on in a raglan style). I kept track of (most of) what I did, so I can make him again if I ever get some masochistic pangs.
It was at this point that I discovered that I didn't make the red stripe on the arm to flow into the red part of the front and back. So I decided to duplicate stitch everything onto the arm. Bad idea. It was too big of an area to look nice and it got really bulky. But I realized this only after I finished both arms. UGHH. So I said fuckit, I'm doing the arms all over again, this time using intarsia. So I knit the two arms only to realize I had made two arms for the right side and completely forgot about reversing the pattern for the left. ARGHHHH!!!! I gave that one to my friend's dog and knit another left arm. So finally I was done with the body.
I used duplicate stitch to put the red spider design on Spidey's back. I actually used a knitting grid to design this one and after 3 or 4 designs I found one that worked and looked really good!
A week ago I used mattress stitch to sew together the arms to the front of the body, and the back of the right arm to the back. I left one side open because now I have to embroider the web.
So I started embroidering the web. I have NO FRICKIN CLUE how to do this. I practiced a bit on one of the spare arms and found something that vaguely looked like a web so I decided to go with that. I first sewed in a thick black thread vertically along every 4th row, in and out of every fourth stitch. Then I started weaving the thread in and out horizontally, trying to get something that looked like a web. I first thought that the webbing should look like U's so that's what I did. After finishing the legs and half of his upper body I realized that they looked like fish scales. I showed it to my mom and she said "It looks like Aquaman!" Fuck. Back to the drawing board. I undid everything and started making the U's more haphazard. I again got through the legs and most of his body when I realized that it still looked like Aquaman. By a complete fluke I put in my needle and thread backwards and realized that I could put just one line inbetween each row. It wouldn't be curved like a web, or like the Spiderman in the comic book, but it looked more like a real spider's web. Huzzah!
And so here I am. I'm about to undo all the webbing again and redo it to look like a janky spiderweb. You've seen those pix of the spiders that they gave different drugs to, right? http://www.trinity.edu/jdunn/spiderdrugs.htm
That's what I'm shooting for.
posted by moneymelon | 05:34
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