Knitting the Anglershark
We're currently running a Kickstarter campaign for our new game, Underleague. If you enjoy strategy card games and gorgeous fantasy art, check it out here! My partner, Sangeetha, loved the art of the game so much she decided to re-imagine one of the creatures from the game in woollen form. I asked her to write a few words about creating this amazing knitted Anglershark. - Fergus
As someone who’s knitted complex items of clothing and taught a knitting class, I like to refer to myself as a knitting expert - as a joke… kinda… However, I had never actually created a whole knitting project from scratch and had never drafted a pattern.
I’ve been lucky enough to see the development of Underleague behind the scenes as my partner Fergus designed it - and I’ve been very involved in playtesting and been among the first people to see new pieces of art from the amazing artist, Mozchops.
As soon as I saw the design of the creature Anglershark, inspiration struck and I knew I had to make it. Unsurprisingly, for an invented creature, there wasn’t an existing pattern, no matter how hard I googled…
Mozchops’ art is full of so many interesting details. I ended up using multicoloured wool to recreate the speckled skin and used toy filling to make the Anglershark a little cuddlier.
Writing a knitting pattern is a lot more technical and mathematical than people imagine, and there was a lot of trial and error - including one rather frustrating moment when I realised how to make it better after about 95% of the body was complete.
As usual, I made the whole thing more complicated for myself and I was being a bit of a perfectionist. But this was my first self-drafted piece so I did it again and again (and again) until ‘Angly’ was finished!
I wrote down what I was knitting in ‘knitspeak’ - where k2, m1l, k8, ssk, k2, k2tog, k8 m1r, k2 makes complete sense and is clearly instructive! When Underleague has funded, I’ll write it up neatly and post it on the fab knitting site Ravelry. If you are a knitter, or if you can easily persuade a friend or loved one who has knitting skills, check back and you could make one for yourself!
It’s been really rewarding and in the end, Angly took a little over a week to make from start to finish. I’ve had some really lovely feedback and I’m pretty proud of it* myself! It’s awesome to see the game brought to life in knitting and I hope you love it too! If you haven't already, check out Underleague on Kickstarter!
*It’s probably best not to call Angly ‘he’ or ‘she’, so I try to say ‘it’, but if we’re being really technical, most anglerfish that you think of are actually always female, with the male usually orders of magnitude smaller than the female, and attach themselves to the side of the female anglerfish, eventually merging into the female. So Angly is almost definitely ‘she’...