‘Tis the season for me to obsess about costumes. For most of the year my crafting obsessions are largely to do with gifts, or sometimes a new thing for home or everyday apparel. But in June, just before my favorite (and sometimes only) gaming convention of the year, I think obsessively about what new technique-y thing I can learn to make my costume-idea-du-jour the most awesome.
Every year, I try to add a few new things to the costumes I wear to the June gaming convention. This year, I have too many ideas left over from last year, plus new ideas. Last year’s innovations included prosthetic ears, wigs that I learned to style myself, and a new bustle and overskirt. And the effect was awesome!
Also, I have since realized, that I’m not just a person who attends convention in costume, I am a cosplayer. I didn’t realize until last year, that cosplayers weren’t some special people doing something different than me, it’s a thing I also do. If you, like me, don’t know much about the word “cosplay”, it means that you like to dress up in costume just for fun (probably at appropriate venues, where other people are in costume, like a geek-culture convention of some sort), beyond something you would do for work (say, if you worked at a museum), beyond historical reenactment activities, and beyond halloween. You just like to assemble and wear elaborate costumes (you can buy or make them). And it doesn’t have to be a costume representing a specific character from a movie, graphic novel or book (another area in which I was confused). So far, I dress up in costumes as a character of my own creation. But down the road, I have a vaguely formed wish to make a costume to represent each of the Pathfinder Iconics in a victoriana-ish style, just to meld together some disparate geek passions of mine.
So I actually did accomplish a lot of new things on the costume front last year despite May having a nearly-walking baby to chase after, a husband finishing graduate school, a graduation, and getting the longest-lasting cold of my life.
One of last year’s ideas that I never capitalized on was the idea of knitting with scales. The Crafty Mutt has some beautiful tutorials and patterns, and there are sellers on Etsy with finished projects for sale as well if you are intimidated by the idea of knitting with scales. From what I could find though, The Crafty Mutt seems to be the only one out there designing patterns for knitting with scales.
I picked up Crafty Mutt’s “Knitted Scale Mail Gloves” and “Scale Choker” patterns, and got myself a big sack of various scales from TheRingLord.com. Ready, set, knit!
Buying Scales:
For the patterns I bought, the needed size was the “small” scales from TheRingLord.com (other places sell scales for scale-mail too, and their are some etched ones on Etsy, but this was the best place I could find good deals on bulk plain scales). I got some polycarbonate plastic and some aluminum. They are all very lightweight individually, but since I was buying online, I couldn’t be sure, so I planned my project to be mostly comprised of black plastic scales. I don’t think it will matter for the gloves so much, but I also have a notion to convert the design into knitted scale spats, and I think at that quantity, and because they would be worn vertically, the scaled material might be too heavy for the fabric and sag.
I also went mostly plastic because they are much cheaper: bag of 1000 plastic was $0.01 per scale vs. aluminum which are about $0.03 per scale.
I figured that even if I hated knitting with scales, I could probably make some jewelry out of the metal ones, so I did get a variety of small packs to experiment with, as well as a sampler pack of different sized scales.
Knitting with Scales:
Not nearly as difficult as I feared. I’ve never even knitted with beads before (although I always fancied that I would at some point). The hole on the scales is pretty huge, so even though you stick your needle in the hole and pull the yarn through, it’s not too difficult. I had some trouble getting the scales oriented the way I wanted on my swatch, but figured it out half-way through. Crafty Mutt’s directions are really quite good, but it might be worth re-reading the section on scale orientation. I noticed that in some of the other projects that people show on Ravelry, their scales are sticking out funny. I had this problem too in my swatch, until I realized that I was not following the directions correctly. Each scale should be curved inward towards the fabric when you put it on the needle, but the act of pulling the stitch through flips the end-point of the scale to the wrong direction (vertically up instead of down). Before you knit the next stitch, you manually rotate the point downward and lock it in with the new stitch. When I did it this correct way, the scales hugged the fabric nicely, making the scales naturally lay in a nice smooth fashion.
My tension on this project is also pretty loose and the non-scale fabric pretty squishy, so that may be a factor in them laying nicely too, but I think the biggest factor is how the legs of the stitch pull the scale down and inward when you get it right.
Before long, I was whipping through the rows pretty fast. Since the fabric is just garter stitch, the yarn is worsted, and the scale-attachment is only for 6 stitches every other row, it really moves quite quickly. Happy day! I might get this part of the costume done before the convention! Even if I only knit during commutes!
Unravelling Argyle 