Have you ever wondered how much overlap there is between the world of Knitting and Crochet and that of Dungeons and Dragons? Other than this blog, I mean…
Well, in the Venn diagram of shared interests the region of overlap is bigger than you might think. I have met several fellow knitters at D&D games, as well as gamers in knitting groups. Maybe it’s not really that surprising – after all, this exists. And I don’t honestly believe that I am so unique as to be the only person who likes both fibre craft and games of fantastical adventure. I just find it particularly pleasing to meet someone who shares more than one hobby in common with myself. It makes me feel less… odd. Although I also take some pride in being odd. I just like not being odd alone. I suppose that is simply part of the paradox of being human that we all struggle with; the desire to stand out while at the same time fitting in.
But I digress.
Like many crafters, I found knitting to be a real boon in 2020 – you can do it at home, it feels productive, it is inherently mindful, and a big project can really fill up the time! I also love that I can watch or listen to other things as I knit – the craft keeps my hands busy while the media keeps my brain busy. And one of the things I like to watch while I knit is a ‘little’ show called Critical Role.
Why do I sarcastically put ‘little’ in quotes, you ask? Well, they are coming up on 800 hours of airtime – I think it safely counts as a big show by that point! And yes, I have watched/listened to all – it doesn’t seem like so much when it’s only about four hours a week. People spend more time than that keeping up on soaps, right?
So, perhaps you can see why in my mind a marriage of these two things – knitting and D&D – seemed entirely natural. Or maybe not. I forgot to mention that Critical Role is a Dungeons and Dragons show…
Anyhow, the outcome of this meeting of hobbies in my mind was my Critical Role Pandemic Blanket (below – yes, it is double-sided!), which I must confess I am really quite proud of.
This was a big project, and one that I designed, as well as made, for myself. That was a bit of an indulgence, as prior to this I had been doing a lot of knitting for other people. Mostly for babies. I hit that age when almost everyone I know was having children, and I really wanted to make something special to commemorate the occasion for some of my good friends. In fact, the first of these Epic Baby Blankets was the topic of one of my early posts in this blog. Oliver’s Blanket was closely followed by Alex’s Blanket (too closely – you could have given me some more time to work with guys!) and then I think I got to dabble in one or two different small projects before embarking on Ada’s Blanket… alongside Isabella’s Blanket (yes, this one broke the mould).
Returning to that mould though – these blankets are based on the Lattes and Llamas Geek-Along, in that the designs for the vast majority of the squares were from selected from their archive – based on the (frequently geeky!) interests of the parents of the ultimate recipients (since I couldn’t know the babies interests yet). But rather than knitting each square separately and sewing them together, I decided to work the whole width of the blanket as a single piece, adding in a seed-stitch border between the individual squares. I really dislike sewing up knitting projects – I’d rather cast on couple of hundred stitches and work multiple double-sided patterns in different colours in parallel!
I’m quirky that way.
I really enjoyed these projects – otherwise I wouldn’t have made three – and loved the bright coloured images on neutral background alternating with neutral images on bright backgrounds. And I kind of wanted one for myself. But I also wanted to stretch myself a bit more and design my own squares. I also pushed the boat out on more colours, and made it a little bigger than the baby blankets. That, however, meant that casting on the whole width became decidedly impractical. Luckily I had a revelation – I could use a crochet technique that makes an aesthetically pleasing border between squarest to join them easily, tidily and, most importantly, with no sewing! I found the joining technique in a free pattern on the Lion Brand website years ago – sadly the link doesn’t work anymore.
As for the design of the squares; I wanted a coherent theme beyond ‘geekery’ and Dungeons and Dragons seemed to fit. It wasn’t a big step to Critical Role from there – after all with two 300 plus hour stories, there are plenty of characters to draw inspiration from. In the final product, each corner represents a group (Wizards of the Coast, who publish the game; the Critical Role gang themselves; Vox Machina, the group of main characters from the original CR saga; and the Mighty Nein, their current adventuring crew) while every other square relates to an individual character.
I feel like I need to take a step back here and try and describe the nature of both Critical Role and my relationship with it. As I mentioned before, Critical Role is a Dungeons and Dragons show. I’ve tried to describe D&D before in this blog, although I don’t know that I did a very good job. I called it ‘just a form of cooperative storytelling, in which the outcome of events is determined by rolling dice’. Which sort of conveys the idea of the game, but also fails entirely at describing it. D&D is a game that generates a story – but it is a chaotic narrative, partly improvised by the players as they chose how their character interacts with the situation they are presented with, and partially generated at random from dice roles that determine how successful those interactions are. The story frequently centres around exploring forgotten places (the Dungeons) and fighting off terrible monsters (the Dragons). This all happens agains the backdrop of a fictional world that the Dungeon Master presents to the players.
I’m still not doing it justice. I guess I’m asking you to take it on trust that this can be a lot of fun to take part in. But how can you make that into a show? It’s easy enough really. You film a group of people while they play the game. Of course, it helps when all those people are actors who are used to inhabiting different characters and improvising scenes. This is the basis of Critical Role.
A lot of people who play D&D don’t find it at all fun to watch others play. And I get that. But once again, I’m odd. Before I started playing much myself I actually enjoyed sitting – and, yes, knitting! – while listening to my husband and his group play. I think part of it is simply that I enjoy seeing other people having fun. And that is a big part of the enjoyment that I derive from Critical Role – the cast consistently appear to be having so much fun. And they create interesting, well-drawn characters who have exciting, dark, wacky and sometimes poignant adventures in the world that their DM Matt has created.
So, how did I translate this into a blanket design? The cast of Critical Role consists of 7 players (Laura Bailey, Liam O’Brien, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel and Travis Willingham) as well a Matt Mercer, who has the fun job of trying to herd these cats! Each player has a character they play in the story, and they have one completed and one ongoing tale (or Campaign, as we say in the D&D world). That is 14 characters to represent in blanket squares. It says a lot about the skill of the cast that I can come up with images that I associate with their characters, since I am not really a particularly visual person. Throughout the series they, of course, interact with other characters (it wouldn’t be much of a world or story without other people in it!) that are often played by Matt, and sometimes by guest players. That gave me plenty of additional material for the other 16 squares.
I tried to come up with reasonably simple visuals for each character, and plotted out the designs using a handy little online tool called Stitch Fiddle.For instance, the fair central draw green square depicts Arrows, a Tree & a Pawprint for Laura Baileys character Vex’ahlia, an archer who is most at home in the forest and has a pet bear. This is one of my favourite squares – of course, this might be because Vex is one of my favourite characters! Don’t worry, I’m not going to go through the full list – there are 30 squares, for crying out loud!
I also agonised for a long time about the most appropriate colour for each square, and how to arrange them so that the colours were nicely spread out, characters played by the same person were never adjacent, and characters from the same campaign were alternating – I’m not sure why I was inclined to turn this into more of a puzzle than it had to be! This design work was all in place before 2020 – so I was able to just follow the plan during my pandemic knitting time. The really nice thing about knitting square by square is that if you join them together as you go it gives a very satisfying sense of progression. after all the squares were joined the final crafting step was to add a nice crochet border round the edge, to keep it all together (and even out the edges a little, since keeping absolutely even tension on 30 squares over 12 months is a bit of a big ask!)
And now I have a snuggly blanket that I made myself to keep me cosy when I’m knitting and watching TV. It also brings a nice pop of colour to our otherwise neutral decor.
Okay, I’ve rambled on enough about blankets and dragons and such – I’m off to watch this weeks episode of Critical Role!
A Trifle Bazaar 