Willy warmer followup
Feb. 13th, 2012 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meretia posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
knittingOkay, so long story short, my friend Josh was in the hospital with appendicitis about a month ago. He had this absolutely terrible roommate who basically hated him and his fiance, Andy, and their very dear friend Aidan for being/seeming gay (it's part of the long, long story).
One of the times I was visiting Josh, he was amazed and delighted the knitted beard pattern he'd seen in the latest Knit Picks catalog. So we got to talking about all the silly things one can knit (he's only been knitting since a little before Thanksgiving) and he started musing about how he should knit a penis just to be obnoxious, since he expected his roommate to give him flack for knitting at all. So I pulled Ravelry up on my computer and we looked at the "mature content" patterns for a while, and he decided that he'd be too embarrassed to actually use a penis chapstick cozy or anything like that, but he did like the idea of making matching willy warmers for him and Andy since they were getting married in Ontario in February and he expected it to be cold. Because Josh is just the kind of gentle soul whose response to someone being so cruel to him and the people he loves isn't just spiteful knitting, it's pragmatic spiteful knitting.
So I asked here what yarns would be appropriate for such a project. I ended up saying that I'd buy him the yarn as a wedding present since one of the ones he was interested in is at the LYS at which I usually shop. And then I ended up saying I'd start them for him since he had a hard time casting on with DPNs. Then I ended up saying I'd do one of them since he wasn't sure he'd get them done in time for the wedding.
Their wedding is Wednesday. We actually all drove up to Leamington today. I've done basically nothing but knit the last couple weekends and I was up until 12:30 last night (before I had to be up at 8:00 to drive five hours), but I finally finished the fool thing.
[Caption: Two willy warmers--which are meant to keep a man's privates warm, so basically two sets of knit cock and balls--posed in a kind of parody of a typical knitted FO picture. One is navy blue and slightly over two feet long, and the other is an olivey/bottley green and lavender stripes with fluffy lavender eyelash yarn trim to look kind of like pubic hair. They're on a grey-and-rust-checked couch, with a light blue cabled afghan next to them, and two pillows behind them, one in grey-blue and light earth tone stripes, the other a needlepoint pillow behind them that says "LIVE LAUGH LOVE".]
[Caption: A closer shot of just the two willy warmers on the couch cushion without all the clutter in the background, since the silly place to photograph them is also the spot that gets the best light in the house.]
[Caption: Frontal view of the blue willy warmer. It's on the arm of the couch and the end hangs down to in front of the couch cushion. Brown laminate floor and a shelf with potted plants on it are visible in the background.]
[The large blue willy warmer on a bed with a white and china blue patchwork-style duvet. The willy warmer is easily longer than the vertical side of the pillow next to it.]
Josh wasn't working on anything at the time and he wasn't allowed to use his Blackberry in the hospital, so Andy called me practically begging me for any yarn or needles or patterns I might have just lying around. I gave him a tangle of scrap yarn I found in the bottom of one of my yarn bins. It took Josh a while to decide what yarn he wanted to use for his willy warmers--at this point he was still sore and doped up, he'd been in the hospital for two or three days with nothing to do, and he'd just started to have the apparently causeless severe abdominal pains that would keep him in the hospital eleven days in total while the doctors tried to figure out what was wrong, so he was pretty whiny and crabby at that point. So he started the willy warmer pattern in the scrap yarn to figure out what he was doing. And he kept knitting it. And knitting it. And knitting it.
Meanwhile, Josh's roommate was terrible. He had to tell them that first night that it was disgusting when Andy reached the end of his reserves after a long day of expecting that his fiance was going to die at any minute six weeks before they were supposed to marry and needed Josh to hold him and comfort him before he could calm down again. And they were disgusting and not really engaged. And he took an instant dislike to Aidan, who has a hospital phobia, and picked on him for being jumpy and anxious even after he explained why he couldn't really help it. And he never really seemed to get any less obnoxious. At some point Josh's roommate decided that he was the arbiter of who could visit their room and while he gave up on keeping Andy out, he decided that Aidan wasn't allowed in there at all. Because being a swishy straight man who's close friends with gay people is more threatening than actually being gay, I don't know.
Most of the time when I was there, Josh's friends who were visiting would sit around and think of petty, annoying things he should do to be an ass back. But Josh would just tell us things like "no, be nice. He's in the hospital almost a week with a roommate he doesn't like too, and no one's at their best when they're sick anyway. Leave him alone." (partly just because it pissed his roommate off so to have the OH NOES TURRIBL GAY PERSON be the bigger man, he admitted later). But once he'd told his roommate what he was actually making, when Captain Jerkface tried to get to him by being mean or ridiculing the man who was knitting in front of his (whatever his name was, not Josh's) visitors, Josh would just stare back at him and kind of smile and keep knitting. The tube ended up over two feet long. He and Andy took to calling it the Blue Meanie before it was done.
Then he frogged it and gave me the yarn back after he got out of the hospital because Andy had only asked to borrow it. So I've reknit it because I have no idea what they're going to do with it now that the blush of posing with it and "wow, no wonder you're marrying him!" jokes seems to have worn off, but they have to have the Blue Meanie. It's part of their history now. And it took me at least two weeks to finish, because jeez, a man with a week and a half of nothing but time knits a lot.
The yarn he wanted was a linen/cotton blend that was quite coarse when I handled it at the LYS, and I couldn't remember which colorway was the only one acceptable to his whiny butt. So I phoned him from the store and he told me to pick "whatever you think will work better." It turned out to be Ella Rae's silk/bamboo blend that made me interrupt myself in mid-sentence to squee at him about how soft it was. So he said sure, get that in "whatever colors look nice." So after I spent forever trying to decide whether the lavender I liked would be acceptable or if I should pick something else to go with the green I was pretty sure both of the guys would like, I figured screw it, I'd get them both and he could either pick the one he liked better or learn to change colors and make stripes.
Then when my mom was cleaning up her yarn stash and offered to let me scavenge what I wanted from it, I found this:
[A dark, low-quality camera phone picture of my right hand holding a lump of something furry and kind of bluish-purple. In the background a quilt trails over the side of a white bed and there's some junk on the ground, because I was excited enough to not think to straighten up before I took the picture that made Josh go "oh yeah! The one of... someone's hand... holding a...tribble...?" when I asked if he'd got the picture from my phone.]
And because I'm secretly twelve years old, I knew exactly what to do with it.
[Caption: Side and front views of the green-and-lavender striped willy warmer, with a thick fringe of the lavender eyelash yarn at the top and the cord made of a strand each of the green and lavender yarns tied into a nice bow on the front.]
[Caption: the tube of the purple-and-green willy, with the lavender fur around the top, on the beige living room carpet in strong direct sun to show how shiny the yarn is]
I was kind of surprised how quickly that one went. I finished it in five days even with two or three other fairly major things due this last weekend.
[Caption: A small paper bag with vertical white and silver stripes and a gauze bow that's barely tied, the front bulging out from the two rolled up willy warmers that barely fit in it]
So I packed them into one of the dainty little gift bags left over from the favors for my sister's wedding shower, and apparently even knowing that I was doing half his knitting, the whole um, package caught Josh by surprise too, and the two of them were practically on the floor after they opened it.
[The first five rounds or so of a royal blue mitten with an elaborate cable.]
Josh wants to do equal time on the knitting I wasn't doing when I was doing his knitting. I had been meaning to tell him not to worry about it since he'd finish the darned things if he put the same time in as I did trying to figure out how to do intarsia in the round on a project that small when he wanted a spiral stripe instead of plain stripes, ribut at this point I might let him. Because oh man, my wrists.
One of the times I was visiting Josh, he was amazed and delighted the knitted beard pattern he'd seen in the latest Knit Picks catalog. So we got to talking about all the silly things one can knit (he's only been knitting since a little before Thanksgiving) and he started musing about how he should knit a penis just to be obnoxious, since he expected his roommate to give him flack for knitting at all. So I pulled Ravelry up on my computer and we looked at the "mature content" patterns for a while, and he decided that he'd be too embarrassed to actually use a penis chapstick cozy or anything like that, but he did like the idea of making matching willy warmers for him and Andy since they were getting married in Ontario in February and he expected it to be cold. Because Josh is just the kind of gentle soul whose response to someone being so cruel to him and the people he loves isn't just spiteful knitting, it's pragmatic spiteful knitting.
So I asked here what yarns would be appropriate for such a project. I ended up saying that I'd buy him the yarn as a wedding present since one of the ones he was interested in is at the LYS at which I usually shop. And then I ended up saying I'd start them for him since he had a hard time casting on with DPNs. Then I ended up saying I'd do one of them since he wasn't sure he'd get them done in time for the wedding.
Their wedding is Wednesday. We actually all drove up to Leamington today. I've done basically nothing but knit the last couple weekends and I was up until 12:30 last night (before I had to be up at 8:00 to drive five hours), but I finally finished the fool thing.
[Caption: Two willy warmers--which are meant to keep a man's privates warm, so basically two sets of knit cock and balls--posed in a kind of parody of a typical knitted FO picture. One is navy blue and slightly over two feet long, and the other is an olivey/bottley green and lavender stripes with fluffy lavender eyelash yarn trim to look kind of like pubic hair. They're on a grey-and-rust-checked couch, with a light blue cabled afghan next to them, and two pillows behind them, one in grey-blue and light earth tone stripes, the other a needlepoint pillow behind them that says "LIVE LAUGH LOVE".]
[Caption: A closer shot of just the two willy warmers on the couch cushion without all the clutter in the background, since the silly place to photograph them is also the spot that gets the best light in the house.]
[Caption: Frontal view of the blue willy warmer. It's on the arm of the couch and the end hangs down to in front of the couch cushion. Brown laminate floor and a shelf with potted plants on it are visible in the background.]
[The large blue willy warmer on a bed with a white and china blue patchwork-style duvet. The willy warmer is easily longer than the vertical side of the pillow next to it.]
Josh wasn't working on anything at the time and he wasn't allowed to use his Blackberry in the hospital, so Andy called me practically begging me for any yarn or needles or patterns I might have just lying around. I gave him a tangle of scrap yarn I found in the bottom of one of my yarn bins. It took Josh a while to decide what yarn he wanted to use for his willy warmers--at this point he was still sore and doped up, he'd been in the hospital for two or three days with nothing to do, and he'd just started to have the apparently causeless severe abdominal pains that would keep him in the hospital eleven days in total while the doctors tried to figure out what was wrong, so he was pretty whiny and crabby at that point. So he started the willy warmer pattern in the scrap yarn to figure out what he was doing. And he kept knitting it. And knitting it. And knitting it.
Meanwhile, Josh's roommate was terrible. He had to tell them that first night that it was disgusting when Andy reached the end of his reserves after a long day of expecting that his fiance was going to die at any minute six weeks before they were supposed to marry and needed Josh to hold him and comfort him before he could calm down again. And they were disgusting and not really engaged. And he took an instant dislike to Aidan, who has a hospital phobia, and picked on him for being jumpy and anxious even after he explained why he couldn't really help it. And he never really seemed to get any less obnoxious. At some point Josh's roommate decided that he was the arbiter of who could visit their room and while he gave up on keeping Andy out, he decided that Aidan wasn't allowed in there at all. Because being a swishy straight man who's close friends with gay people is more threatening than actually being gay, I don't know.
Most of the time when I was there, Josh's friends who were visiting would sit around and think of petty, annoying things he should do to be an ass back. But Josh would just tell us things like "no, be nice. He's in the hospital almost a week with a roommate he doesn't like too, and no one's at their best when they're sick anyway. Leave him alone." (partly just because it pissed his roommate off so to have the OH NOES TURRIBL GAY PERSON be the bigger man, he admitted later). But once he'd told his roommate what he was actually making, when Captain Jerkface tried to get to him by being mean or ridiculing the man who was knitting in front of his (whatever his name was, not Josh's) visitors, Josh would just stare back at him and kind of smile and keep knitting. The tube ended up over two feet long. He and Andy took to calling it the Blue Meanie before it was done.
Then he frogged it and gave me the yarn back after he got out of the hospital because Andy had only asked to borrow it. So I've reknit it because I have no idea what they're going to do with it now that the blush of posing with it and "wow, no wonder you're marrying him!" jokes seems to have worn off, but they have to have the Blue Meanie. It's part of their history now. And it took me at least two weeks to finish, because jeez, a man with a week and a half of nothing but time knits a lot.
The yarn he wanted was a linen/cotton blend that was quite coarse when I handled it at the LYS, and I couldn't remember which colorway was the only one acceptable to his whiny butt. So I phoned him from the store and he told me to pick "whatever you think will work better." It turned out to be Ella Rae's silk/bamboo blend that made me interrupt myself in mid-sentence to squee at him about how soft it was. So he said sure, get that in "whatever colors look nice." So after I spent forever trying to decide whether the lavender I liked would be acceptable or if I should pick something else to go with the green I was pretty sure both of the guys would like, I figured screw it, I'd get them both and he could either pick the one he liked better or learn to change colors and make stripes.
Then when my mom was cleaning up her yarn stash and offered to let me scavenge what I wanted from it, I found this:
[A dark, low-quality camera phone picture of my right hand holding a lump of something furry and kind of bluish-purple. In the background a quilt trails over the side of a white bed and there's some junk on the ground, because I was excited enough to not think to straighten up before I took the picture that made Josh go "oh yeah! The one of... someone's hand... holding a...tribble...?" when I asked if he'd got the picture from my phone.]
And because I'm secretly twelve years old, I knew exactly what to do with it.
[Caption: Side and front views of the green-and-lavender striped willy warmer, with a thick fringe of the lavender eyelash yarn at the top and the cord made of a strand each of the green and lavender yarns tied into a nice bow on the front.]
[Caption: the tube of the purple-and-green willy, with the lavender fur around the top, on the beige living room carpet in strong direct sun to show how shiny the yarn is]
I was kind of surprised how quickly that one went. I finished it in five days even with two or three other fairly major things due this last weekend.
[Caption: A small paper bag with vertical white and silver stripes and a gauze bow that's barely tied, the front bulging out from the two rolled up willy warmers that barely fit in it]
So I packed them into one of the dainty little gift bags left over from the favors for my sister's wedding shower, and apparently even knowing that I was doing half his knitting, the whole um, package caught Josh by surprise too, and the two of them were practically on the floor after they opened it.
[The first five rounds or so of a royal blue mitten with an elaborate cable.]
Josh wants to do equal time on the knitting I wasn't doing when I was doing his knitting. I had been meaning to tell him not to worry about it since he'd finish the darned things if he put the same time in as I did trying to figure out how to do intarsia in the round on a project that small when he wanted a spiral stripe instead of plain stripes, ribut at this point I might let him. Because oh man, my wrists.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-14 01:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-14 01:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-14 03:10 am (UTC)I wish them both love, and joy, and longevity in their marriage. You are a wonderful friend. :)