Octopus!

Kathryn's kitten card

Continuing my trend of cute animals, here's a birthday card I made for my friend Kathryn with felt on paper. Lest you find me twee, I promise something edgier next time!

Bulldog pillows

Inspired by the excellent bulldogs, Lola and Messier. This is my first experiment in heavy duty color knitting. Here are pictures of the finished product, along with both dogs and their corresponding pillows.

I started by drawing a color sketch of both dogs' faces, then scanned that and outlined it using GIMP. I printed the outlined version on knitting graph paper, which I colored in to make a rough pattern for knitting.

The backs are attached using blanket stitch. I used an acrylic yarn (Paton's Canadiana), chosen for their wide range of colors and the fact that theoretically, the pillow covers are machine washable, just in case the real dogs get too close and have some kind of slobber incident.

I've posted the original sketch and one of the outlines here too, just so you can see the whole process from beginning to end (minus the messy part of weaving in all those ends). The project took maybe 6 months of irregular working to complete.

Kathy's hat

This hat is made from a cool yarn named "Galway Paint" and it now belongs to a cool girl named Kathy Quinn.

Atlas Shrugged - The Animated Series

While reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, I happened to catch an episode of the "Batman - Superman Animated Adventures." Seeing Lois Lane in her business suit, along with Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent -- set against the deco skyscrapers of Gotham -- put me in mind of the book I was enjoying. I wanted to see Dagny, Francisco, and Hank Reardon animated in the same way.

Soon after that, I happened to read that Atlas Shrugged has been optioned for a movie starring Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Russell Crowe. Yikes. I preferred the never-realized 70s lineup of Faye Dunaway, Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood.

Anyway, I decided I'd make up my own drawings, so here they are: The characters from Atlas Shrugged in the style of "Batman: the Animated Series." Stay tuned for Francisco D'Anconia and some of the more villainous characters.

Cody's T-Rex

The life aquatic/Antarctic

These penguin and whale hats were created for my colleague Bill Brenner's two boys around Christmas. He sent me this picture of them playing in the amazing mounds of snow around their house. Check out the matching mittens! Very cool.

More kid hats for Trixie and Madchen

IT guy comic: Disaster recovery

Check out my new comic over on the Network Hub blog... it has a Star Wars reference.

Sam's soccer hat

These are pictures of a hat I designed and knit back in November for Sam, a very cool kid I know who is also a soccer star at the ripe old age of 5.

I searched all over the internet for a soccer ball pattern, but couldn't find one. I ended up stealing a black and white image of a ball and transferring it onto knitting graph paper. I knit the white ball and black pentagons into the hat using intarsia, which required working a section of the hat back and forth instead of in the round. (I had to seam up the gap when I was finished, which ended up looking OK.

I added a white outline to make the ball appear rounder and stitched on the black lines between "spots" when I was finished using a backstitch.

Sam also requested that I add his name to the back of the hat so nobody in his class could steal it, so I did that in backstitch as well on Thanksgiving day.

Here's a picture of Sam wearing the finished product.