Fight

Well, I promised you some knitted love, and so here it is. With pictures!


This lovely beauty is my most recent completed project. A shawl, as you can probably guess. She's hand-dyed baby llama from my lys, spun with a bit of glitz in there to make it shine in the sunlight.
I added the extra panel on each side so that it would be a cozy shawl I could wrap around me in the cold weather, and boy did that work out great. The shape makes me think of batman, though. Maybe I'll do a basic one in all black next.
I would have made her even bigger, but I was running very low on yarn when I finally cast off.
The edging pattern is just something I drew up really quick on some graph paper, knit a quick test, and then put into use. It was supposed to be mountain-y looking , but the way they stacked ended up making diamonds. I should have expected that, but whatever. I like the look. I've been calling her Igraine in my head, after the character from Marion Zimmer Bradley's book, The Mists of Avalon. It's a whimsical connection. Igraine, the father of Arthur Pendragon, goes from the mountainous cliffs of Cornwall to the comfort and luxury of being queen of Britain.

Mountains to jewels, get it? No? I thought it was kind of tenuous, too.

My current WIP is this guy, who doesn't have a name yet. This is all handspun (not by me, unfortunately) alpaca gained at various sheep shows. I originally wanted one that was a pretty neutral color, hence the cream (I know it looks white, but it is definitely a cream color), but I quickly ran low on that, and so I had to improvise or frog the whole thing and make a scarf.
I am nothing, if not determined.
So, I hunted in my stash for something similar and came up with a few inches of scarf attached to a ball of dark/light gray alpaca of the same approximate weight. It's hard to be exact with handspun. One ripped scarf and a few randomly spaced stripes later, and I had a pretty sweet looking fade from one yarn into the other, and I was going along with the gray, of which I have significantly more yardage.

This will be a big, warm shawl when I am done.



And now, for a break from my knitting. I spoke before about a video game called Mass Effect, and how much I enjoyed it.
Well, in a week, the final game in the trilogy is coming out to massive anticipation from gamers. This is the culmination of every decision you made over the last two games. The war for Earth has begun, and not everyone will survive. Let me quote Bioware to give you a brief summary: "An ancient alien race, known only as "Reapers", has launched an all-out invasion leaving nothing but a trail of destruction in their wake. Earth has been taken, the galaxy is on the verge of total annihilation, and you are the only one who can stop them. The price of failure is extinction."
Their marketing campaign for this game can be, and is, summed up by the phrase, "Take Earth Back". The start of the game sees you fleeing into space with your crew, newly reinstated to Commander, to gather allies and rouse the galaxy against the Reaper threat. Earth is in crumbling, flaming ruins. To fail in your mission is to watch as all life in the galaxy is annihilated.
Their trailers and commercials are poignant. I want to share two that really hit me.
The first is simply called Take Earth Back. Sound isn't necessary, but it helps.
The second is called Fight. This one is live-action and needs sound.

"Faced with becoming nothing, we fight for everything."
~the Fight trailer

P.S.: Those squid-cuttlefish-looking things descending from the sky? Those are Reapers.