New Design, Apparently! The Andromeda Cowl

I really don't have anything better to do. I mean, I'm not sick and super busy with the day job, I don't have a late commission, nope, nothing is waiting for me to get to it, obviously I can waste an entire day (much of which I was at a meeting for work) creating a brand new item!

So over on Ravelry, I'm in a group called Nerd Wars. This fun group is a competition between members of different fandoms to create knit, crochet, and spun items related to their fandoms. I'm on team Babylon 5 (an excellent sci fi series from the 90s, which I was a HUGE fan of and am still rather fond of). The idea is simple - the moderates for Nerd Wars gave us challenges, and we have to make items that relate to one of the challenges.

So one of the challenges is to make things related to nebula. I immediately thought of hyperspace from B5, which looks like this:


I thought...why not make a cowl? Mine is taking a beating this winter, and they didn't look too hard! Then, I decided to get fancy. In B5, hyperspace is accessed through jumpgates:


So I thought...what if I did a piece that transitioned from blue to red? That'd be awesome, right?

I grabbed some random yarn and took it with me to a meeting today. I really wanted to work in the idea of the spirals like in the jumpgate (or a spinning planetary nebula, or a spiral galaxies arms). As I messed with the yarn, after a lot of trial and error, I started to get a shape that I liked. I was almost done, when I realized that really I should have done it differently...so I frogged the whole thing. I'm rather proud of myself. I've never done that before. Anyway, I finished the first draft right before I got home from my all day meeting:



(forgive my not so good appearance, I actually am sick, and exhausted to boot, and can't currently afford a haircut, and really should be asleep but I was soooo close to finishing...)




Anyway, having finished this draft, I'd decided on what I was going to do as my version for the Nerd Wars challenge: a jump gate through and through, in turquoise and black. This might have been a problem, but as happy chance had it, Michaels was on my way home from the meeting, and a few minutes ago, I finished the Jump Gate version of the cowl! (I'm calling the other the Nebula Version)





This last shot really shots the blue and black to good effect, in my opinion:


All in all, I'm VERY happy with how this turned out. I've NEVER designed something like this before - not a cowl, not a crochet item that used textures and stitches and patterns to make a particular effect. It was a lot of work to get it to look right - to put it in perspective, I started this project on the bus at 7 am this morning, and it took me until 5:30 to finish the first version (the second version took about 3 and a half hours to makes).

I decided to call it the Andromeda Cowl, because I wanted it to look like the spiral arms of a galaxy, and of course Andromeda is our sister galaxy. :)

I will definitely be having this pattern tested for release. Probably soon.