Showing posts with label knitwear. Show all posts
Showing posts with label knitwear. Show all posts

Softsweater Games! - This War of Mine game review.

Monday, 1 February 2016
Oh hi folks,

So me and my partner play quite a few video games, what's better than sitting next to someone playing an interactive story while you knit! It's like storytelling where you get to direct the story! For the most part at least.

So this game This War Of Mine.



It's set in wartimes. I actually hate war games, usually they're a bunch of dude-voices yelling and guns shelling and it's just a big bummer all around. This game isn't like that, you start off as a group of friends who have all unfortunately been homeless since the war hit. They find an abandoned house, which still has some walls intact and settle in.

The way the game mechanics work is that you have daytime and nighttime. During the day you tend your wounds with bandages, treat your sick friends with medicine and cook the veggies you find or the rats you catch. You can patch up the walls, you can build things to grow food, you can make moonshine. You know, all the ESSENTIALS for surviving a war.

In the evening you choose one of your crew to scavenge. And someone else to guard. The lucky leftover people get to sleep in the rickety beds you have to make during the day.

The first 18 nights we didn't encounter any assholes. Just lovely people who were actually offering up food and things to help us stay alive. A 'neighbour' brought us some veggies from their garden, later one of our crew helped them patch up their house a bit. It was mostly really lovely, eventually we met a homeless guy who needed food, but we hadn't brought any with us so we had to leave him. When we went back a couple of nights later he had passed away due to starvation. That was a bummer - but honest and realistic.

By night 19 we were struggling because one of our buddies had gotten stabbed when someone tried in the night to rob us. We didn't have any bandages and the place we chose to scavenge had an elderly couple in it. They were struggling to survive and the woman was sick.

We walked past them and took some bandages, and they didn't fight us. Because that's realistic. The man followed closely behind and begged us not to steal his wife's medicine.

Rough night, the game got a bit harder after then.

When the character that we were playing returned, everyone turned on him. They were disgusted that we had stolen medical supplies from an elderly couple. It's very honest to real life with everyone's thoughts and opinions coming into play.

And me and Thomas sat rationalizing it, but it made us think. What would we do if it weren't just a game?

We're on day 21 now and I can see that this game has a lot more to offer. The first five hours of gameplay were engaging, full of moral contradictions and lots of contemplation. We'll keep playing.

Well worth the $15.


Oh, and for the knitters, I am working my way through Part 1 of my #waitingforrainKAL! We started today if you're interested in joining pop over to my instagram account or my ravelry page to register!

Porteau Cove! A Pattern By Tiny Island Textiles

Sunday, 1 November 2015
The lovely Nicola Hodges from Tiny Island Textiles has put up her gorgeous stole pattern Porteau Cove out into the world! It's downloadable on Ravelry.com! Here's the link.

Porteau Cove




I'm so happy about this pattern coming out! It's sort of a proof of concept for me! Because it's the first pattern to be helped along with the Graph Paper Cooperative in mind. 

Me and Nicola have been friends for ages and ages and she's always helped me really heavily with my designs. She has test-knitted the Lonely Tree, she has knitted samples for me, she has modelled for 6 of my patterns, she has read through my patterns and my god she has blocked almost every lace thing I've ever knit. I can honestly say that her help has made my designing process one that is manageable for me and I credit a lot of my success to her! So in a sense the two of us have been doing this sort of Graph-Paper-Coop-y thing for a while now, unofficially. 

What is this Graph Paper Coop-y thing? Well, The Graph Paper Cooperative is a thing that me and Nicola thought up over a series of conversations about supporting local knitwear designers. Nicola's been a designer since I met her, but she had never published on Ravelry. And I've always struggled with a couple of aspects of knitwear design, and have needed her support. 

The Graph Paper Cooperative was based on the idea that you need a whole pile of skills to publish patterns on Ravelry. You need to know how to design a pattern, write out the instructions so other people can knit them, you need to knit good samples out of nice yarn and have the pattern photographed beautifully and beautifully layed out and then you need to send it to testers who can give you feedback on all of those aspects of your pattern so you can tweak it further. 

It's a big process and if you're missing any of those skills it can make it really hard to self publish your own patterns. Or you may publish them but have them met with a "meh" because one or more of those pieces is missing. 

The Graph Paper Cooperative fills in the blanks so that people don't need to have absolutely every skill involved in publishing. and if you want the skills you can mentor and develop them with us. Or, if you're part of the cooperative, you can just ask for help from the other members. 

In the way that I've been asking for help from Nicola for ages, with blocking and modelling and pattern testing and sampling. And she was able to get some assistance from me with publishing Porteau Cove! 


It's Cooperative magic. 

We sat down a couple of weeks ago at my favourite coffee shop and I pulled up InDesign and we built a Tiny Island Textiles Knitwear Pattern template for her, and then we started putting the pattern together (with some photos I took from 2012 when she first designed this beautiful thing!). And now it's published and I'm just plain stoked! I hope you'll pop over and buy a copy. It's been made with love and it really is the best thing to just have a huge pile of lace knitting wrapped around your body. Also it helps support Nicola on her adventures being an awesome person who lives on a Tiny Island, raising sheep and building a textile studio cabin with her own two hands. Lovely! 



The Crawl is here!

Friday, 16 November 2012



Hi folks, remember when I said I was going to post every day up until the Culture Crawl started... well that didn't happen. I'm still going to be selling my knitwear and patterns and some buttons there though! Come check me out at the Mergatroid building Suite 260! 
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