Introduction

Last year I took up the challenge to Knit for 30 minutes every day in November, to raise money for the Bone Cancer Research Trust. In total I managed to raise £413 because my job matches my fundraising up to £200 a year. I used the time to crochet the Raziel amigurumi. Don’t get pedantic that crochet and knitting aren’t the same.

This year I am taking on the challenge to knit a Christmas jumper over the course of December to raise money for Cancer Research UK.

Specifically I am taking the “Order of the Jedi Pullover” from “Star Wars: Knitting the Galaxy” by Tanis Gray (though the jumper itself is designed by Meghan Regan). I have made this jumper before, but it didn’t go well (it was way too small), so I am making two changes:

1. I won’t blindly trust the pattern - I will repeatedly check the size and try to adjust the pattern to ensure that it is comfortable for me to wear
2. I’m changing the motifs - this won’t be a Star Wars jumper, it will instead be a Legacy of Kain jumper (of course)

There is a facebook group for this challenge, and despite it being explicitly about knitting over December, there are already a multitude of posts from people who have already finished. Weeks before December starts.

As such, I don’t feel particularly guilty in saying that I have started early. My first jumper attempt took me about 8 months, so I need to use my time wisely.

I finished designing the motifs (generally) on Saturday, so I’m a couple of days in.

I will try to post regularly to the fundraising page, and will strive to do more sparse summaries on this post.

If you would like to donate, then please do so. Cancer sucks.

5th December - first 3 motifs

This is technically day 5, but in reality day 12 due to the head start.

I’ve completed 3 of the motifs so far:

1. A gold filigree
2. The skull/cross guard from the physical Reaver
3. The Elder God’s ever present eyes

The next section is the last on the yoke, before moving on to the body: The Nine Pillars of Nosgoth

The complication here is that each Pillar has a different colour.

Since each motif gets repeated 18 times, that means I can do each pillar twice.

However, it is ludicrous to carry a single colour across half of the jumper (and since I would be doing that for 9 of them, that’s a lot of strands), so instead I need to do intarsia (having a separate ball per colour).

I’ve measured out strands for the different colours - each one will certainly not take 50g, so I tried to make an educated guess (measured out the full width of the block, multiplied that by 22). If it’s not enough, then I can always join a new strand in.

BUT, I also can’t do the pattern in the round like I previously have, otherwise I need to strand the yarn across 14 stitches without a way to secure it. As such I need to switch to stockinette stitch (knit row, followed by a purl row).

The biggest risk with this is it laddering at the back, so I need to also be careful with that.

I hope that this will take me no longer than a week.

I’ll update this with pictures later.

12th December - Pillar Symbols

Day 12/19

Thankfully doing the Pillar symbols took 6 days, so I’m pretty good at estimating the time, which is unlike me.

The motif itself took around 40 different strands of yarn (main background colour, bronze border, (pillar main colour + white for the symbol) x 9 x 2, plus an additional couple of whites because the initial ones were too small).

Since I was doing stockinette, that actually kept it to a minimum - otherwise each line would have been a different strand to prevent carrying it too far back and forth (so it would have been about 14 times as many!)

The unfortunate consequence of that was that the Balance symbol at the back had a gaping hole in it (since there was no connection between each side) so I had to stitch that up at the end.

It was impossible to make sure they all kept separated - even if I managed to do it, they bunched together when I would put the project back in the bag.

As a result, though I am now technically onto the body, I’m instead focussing my time on trying to weave in all of the strands so they don’t get in the way when doing the rest.

Happy with my progress, and I’m still hopeful I’ll get it done by the end of the month (preferably earlier!)

22nd December - Body Motifs

Day 22/29

I had thought that it was a week since my previous update, turns out it was 11 days. Whoops!

In that time I’ve managed to mostly complete the body motifs - Raziel’s wraith symbol on the back, Kain’s on the front, and Reaver smybols surrounding them (8 in total)

It was a lot of work - each round is 240 stitches, and the motifs were 43 rounds (so 10,320 stitches)

But there’s actually more - I after splitting the body and sleeves, I did an extra round to make sure that I had 240 stitches.

Somehow, I had 246. So I did another round, doing 6 increases evenly spaced.

I put stitch markers every 20 stitches as that is the width of the motif (Kain and Raziel take up two blocks) - this revealed that the marker that was exactly half way around and directly under the left armpit was actually off by 3 stitches - evidently the extra 6 weren’t evenly around.

Ok, I did another round, doing 3 increases around the front and 3 decreases around the back to pull the marker to the correct place.

This was actually wrong, as that pulled the marker further out of position. Rather than pulling the marker I needed to push the stitches.

So, another round, this time with the decreases in the front and increases in the back.

Finally, it was 240 around.

Did the motifs. Was going really well (though stitchfiddle had cut off a bit of the Reaver symbols, so I had to edit the pattern). Then I noticed that I had missed a chunk of the Raziel motif - about 2 rows. I was about 1000 stitches further along by the time I realised, and there’s now way I was going to try and frog that. So instead I’ve decided to embroider it when weaving in the ends (which I’ve almost finished).

I was tempted to add more, like a “Vae Victus” a bit lower down, but I’m a bit exhausted, so the rest will just be the background colour.

In terms of the fundraising, work has agreed to my match funding request, so I’ve managed to raise £458.75 at the time of writing (the match funding isn’t included on the page, and I’m not sure if I should include it as external fundraising, in case I then get stuck with having to pay more).

So far it’s just been friends/family/colleagues donating, so if you’re reading this and I don’t know you, please consider giving a donation.