#giant knitting

[giant-tiny-fiber-friends]

Knitting in G/T

Let's get started with a classic!

(This is a continuation of a conversation that began here, for context)

I'm intending for this to be partly an informative post, as well as a conversation starter in case anyone had ideas or questions regarding the topic. As part of the g/t writing community, I know how handy it can be to have resources for niche topics, so hopefully this can help or inspire someone! I'm going to talk about knitting in existing g/t media, some of the possibilities I can think of as far as knitting for giants and tinies go, and some examples of what gives me real life g/t vibes in knitting.

Knitting, for clarity, is the art of turning yarn into fabric using a pair of needles. It seems like one of those crafts that people have plenty of ideas about with tinies, but doesn't so readily come up with giants. Maybe we'll fix that here, we'll see!

In Media

I've noticed this has mostly been explored from the tiny side of things, at least in established media. Now's the part where I admit that I do not have a comprehensive understanding and grasp of g/t media, so if there are further examples of this that exist, I'd love to hear about them! For now, the most immediate examples I can think of is The Borrowers, both in the book and one of the film adaptations.

The first is featured in one of the original covers of the original book, a colorized version of an illustration that shows Homily knitting on a pair of pins.

The text describes her as "knitt(ing) their jerseys and stockings on black headed pins, and, sometimes, on darning needles (...)" and goes on to describe her using spools of silk or cotton thread to do so. This is doable, especially since both thread and pins can vary in thicknesses, which can affect the way the fabric created behaves. One would simply need to find or make pins that were more dull, because those things can get Sharp!

Darning needles, which are slightly bigger than what you'd think of as sewing needles but still pretty thin, are a little thicker and I would think would be used with something a bit more substantial than thread. I'll get into this more in depth when I get around to talking about spinning, but yarn can be spun pretty finely, and tinies could easily be resourceful enough to manage to get it to a usable size, no matter the needles used.

As an aside, the BBC's 1992 iteration of The Borrowers quietly goes into more detail about this side of their existence. It ran for two seasons, covering most of the books up til "The Borrowers Aloft", I believe. The whole thing can bee found on YouTube, and someone recently posted an HD remaster!

Homily's knitting crops up throughout the first arc as not only a tool for keeping her family warm, but as a way for her to cope with her anxiety. She quickly picks up her knitting (from a small ball of wool she seems to have wound herself rather than from a spool, which is much more mobile) after an argument with Arrietty, and while she waits for Pod to come home from late-night borrowing.

Then, after they flee the cottage, they collect wild wool (seen above) from the brambles to use as insulation, and I believe the implication is that it's later spun into yarn for Homily to use to make Arrietty a sweater/jumper and herself a cardigan, shown in this short clip:

Seriously, if you haven't seen this adaptation, I highly recommend! Lookit Homily getting to be a bit of a badass for once!

The Potential

Knitting like this is plausible in g/t spheres, in my opinion. A lot of modern knitting has grown to lean away from separate straight needles like the pins would facsimile, choosing circular needles instead. Basically it's a few inches of solid needle attached to a flexible cord that more easily allows a knitter to work in a continuous tube (like hats), but they can be used to make flat things (like scarves) as well.

Even if an article is made of tubes- hats, sweaters, and even socks- they can still be made flat and seamed together. So if all a tiny has access to are a pair of pins, or if all a giant can do is carve and polish some wood into straight needles, it's a perfectly valid way to go about things. I'm not going to put a limit on the innovations of big or small folk to be able to come up with workarounds if they truly wanted to make a circular needle equivalent, though. Maybe a tiny could use a sturdy yet flexible bit of wire with the tips worn down to a taper, or a giant could MacGyver something with literal cabling, who knows? I'm all for hearing other ideas!

Real Life G/t Vibes

Most Vibes I get from knitting are from things made with really thick or thin yarn. Big, chunky yarn reminds me of how even the thinnest of yarn would probably still be quite lofty to a tiny. To me, it gives the feeling of having found doll's clothing and using it to keep warm!

The Harper Jacket by Ciadree via Ravelry.com

And I know it's not really useful to a hypothetical giant, but knitting tiny things does give one the feeling of being big. I'm often reminded of Althea Crome, the self-proclaimed micro-knitter who made the knits in the movie Coraline and has a whole gallery of miniature knitted art!

Mixing different weight (sizes) and colors of yarn also gives me very homemade, using what you have on hand even if it doesn't match kinda vibes, which I find fitting for both giants and tinies. They (most likely) don't have textile shops where they can get all matching bits. Or maybe they do, and that's valid, too! I'll get into more detail about that when I talk about scraps and stash eventually, but I think this post has gotten quite long enough.

If you have any more ideas or questions about this topic, and especially if you have more examples in existing g/t media that I don't know of or forgot about when writing this, please do keep the conversation going!

[certainwizardlady]

Granny Button coming in hot

[icterid-rubus]

Lydia Morrow has come out with my dream cardigan! It has optional bust and hip shaping, as well as a crop version, with button band or icord closure options. As with all her patterns, there is also a sliding pay scale to make it accessible for all who wish to knit it.

Lydia works really hard to make sure she’s putting out patterns that prioritize fat people—not just fat afab! Her husband tries on all her designs and they’re made so one can have a little, a lot, or no bust room. The project language reflects that, and it is described neutrally.

If you’d like to support her work without even buying anything, follow the ravelry link to the project to help it trend!

If ravelry is inaccessible for you, the pattern is available on her website as well.

[alericdoesthings]

Finally finished my Apollo 18 sweater! Completely made from my own brain from the sweater pattern, to the embroidery chart.

Had a lot of fun with this one, perhaps Ill make more TMBG sweaters in the future. I have some ideas for the Pink Album and Lincoln that could be cool.

[dailypokemoncrochet]

You know how there's a Yoshi and Kirby yarn game? I want a pokemon yarn game. I get a lot of enjoyment out of seeing all my little yarn pokemon and having them in a video game would be especially cool because they could have all the little extra details and effects I can't quite make in real life

[tomorobo-illust]

See hi-res version here: patreon.com/posts/106479528

I've been meaning to draw this sweet good boy for almost a year now and SO happy I finally got to draw him ;w; This character, Mosstifer (Moss) is @extra-standard-deviation's creation for their DnD campaign and I was in love with him the moment I saw him <3

I used the screenshots as ref from their Final Fantasy XIV game where Moss is living his best life chilling with his (not) husbando in their sweet cottagecore home~ Thank you once again Kestrel for feeding me new updates and lore for your good boy!! I wish nothing but the best for him~

[luna-loveboop]

Egg.

Linktober day 5- sacred

It's Zelda's secret stone from totk. I think the name secret stone is stupid, so have always wanted to call them sacred stones instead.

This was actually just an exercise in how small of an egg I could carve a secret stone and triforce on. Next to a quarter it's very smoll.

Insert joke about Zelda eating both egg and actual stone here

[i-knit-you-not]

uuhh, hypothetically, asking for a friend, let's say you have bought a ton of really shitty yarn. Like the worst acrylic you ever touched because it was really cheap (not actually that cheap actually) and you have no impulse control. it's 2kg of yarn, one color (charcoal). what would you make? Hypothetically of course

[so-very-small]

sewing small pieces of metal into my tiny friend’s clothes so whenever i need to pick them up quickly i can just hover a magnet over them

[coconut530]

TEACHERS STRIKE BACK

[airi-p4]

I saw this on Twitter and I HAD to.

Original HERE (by @/wobbuuu on Twitter )

Update: PART 2

[territorial-utopia]

Sweater weather and leaves (aka lehti which is also the word for news paper asdasjkd)

Wonder what he found in the news, whatever it is he sure found it important enough to share

[amethystsoda]

The queen (of the dungeon) has arrived 🙏

[vashti-lives]

Four years ago I knit Virgil* over election weekend as stress relief and I decided I needed another fast softie project for this year…

*Virgil is the big guy, the rainbow one was knit for a friend.

I’m gonna use this pattern but with a twist

[djeterg19]

This Daughter's of Ferrix color way is giving Doctor Who scarf vibes knit up

[the-hilda-librarians-wife]

Going buckwild at the way Hilda The Series portrays adulthood and loneliness. Kaisa has no one to go to to ask for help getting the due book back, even though all it would take was someone she could minimally ask to knock on an elderly lady’s door and ask for a favour; she’s in the library after hours, is shown to have no allies aside from the woman who raised her and who she lost contact with. Johanna is only ever seen working or caring for Hilda, and her lack of a life aside from those two activities is pointed out by her own daughter when she thinks that this is going so far as to affect their relationship. The bell keeper lives alone in a small cabin on the edge of town, barely within city limits and away from everyone, a house barely even inhabitable and clearly only a place to sleep and eat. He works a solitary job and he’s the only one in the town still working it, meaning he’s probably overworked and forced to pull inhumanly long shifts. Victoria hyperfocused so hard on her projects that whatever friends she had before - and she must have had some from college time at least - lost contact with her, and she never made any other connections in Trolberg, anything that would tie her to the city and it’s inhabitants and make it so it wasn’t worth it to live by herself at the top of a hill. Even when that was over, she still chose to isolate herself somewhere abandoned and keep what was essentially another machine she’d built as her source of company, something she could understand and control instead of an unpredictable human being. Gerda works a job she likes but is shown to be disregarded by the person she works the most around, her abilities and intellect thrown aside for the good of someone she has to bear because of a hierarchy she was forced to accept in order to keep working. She’s appreciated by the town, but other than the main characters, we don’t see anyone paying her any mind when they don’t need something from her.

Meanwhile no kid has ever been alone in Trolberg. The mean kids are a group, the good kids are a group, even the gloomy teenage girls are a group. One of nightmare inducing entities, but a group nonetheless. All children in that world seem to operate on a ‘no man left behind’ code, looking out for each other even if they aren’t exactly fans of one another, helping even grown ups without asking why and working together. And this logic seems to extend to the adults who work around children too; especially the Raven Leader, who we see that through the children works as a vital part of the community and a way through which it comes together.

This isn’t very articulate but do you see the point? Do you see how clever that is? That a show about growing up has these themes? You can be magical, kind, strong, intelligent, competent, but none of that will make you truly happy if you don’t keep the most important thing from childhood? If you don’t keep your friendships, your bonds, something to tie you down to your reality and your community? The adults in the show all made their choices, and it’s okay to want to be alone, we all need it and some more than others (this is coming from someone who needs it a lot), but isolating yourself completely is the one thing that will make growing pains truly painful. I’m just so emotional over it. It’s so subtle and so clever considering the whole Mountain King plot that Hilda is willing to change species because she feels detached from her main relationships and surroundings. I love this show so much.