Knitting Frog & Toad: Part One the naked frog
Knitting Frog & Toad: Part Two fiddly chaos
The friend who ponied up the not inconsiderable money for this project’s yarn came over recently and wanted to see the frog. I was a bit nervous. He doesn’t quite look like the finished product on the pattern…but luckily she liked it (and her voice rose about four octaves exclaiming over the cuteness). Big relief.
The pants also cover up all the knobby bits where I fixed/tightened the knit so the ground nut filling doesn’t leak out. The pants knitting was thankfully a nice vacation from difficult patterns. It’s mostly just p1, knit1 etc. around each leg (while the other leg is on a bit of scrap yarn). No provisional cast ons. No having to measure. No worrying about tightness of knit. Very relaxing. I’m watching this over-the-top hokey Japanese drama with Tokyo Boy while I am knitting frog’s clothing.
It’s called Daughter of Lupin (the daughter of a famous crime family falls in love with the son of a famous police family….only the crime family isn’t as terrible as one first thinks and the fighting scenes are hokier than old batman shows and the theme music is catchy and the hikikomori crime older brother perfectly embodies the kind of slightly feminine (to western eyes) bishonen manga aesthetic as he wields his mechanical ladybug spies from his room) Watching this tv show while knitting is perfect because its easy to follow (trope-heavy) and also keeps me from “cheating” on Japanese input by reading the English subtitles because I have to glance down at my knitting every few seconds.
The theme song that appears every time the main heroine changes from her mild-mannered, super frilly feminine children’s librarian job persona to the martial arts crime family member is addictive. I keep humming it to myself. There’s also a random crime friend of hers that appears randomly during the show and meets with her. He then sings about her boyfriend issues (she joins in as a duet sometimes) and twirls about carrying a cane. The first time he appeared I was like…what? But then I just went with it.
I think that’s how you enjoy such a super hoky show…just go with it. Suspend all the disbelief. Enjoy the predictability (except for the unpredictability of the random singing friend).
The actress who plays the grandmother…is just….odd in terms of the way she presents herself physically and the high-pitched voice/dialect she uses.
The pants yarn is a bit rough. It’s kind of tweedy and easy to split. So definitely need to try hard not to split the yarn or mistake a strand for an extra stitch. Let’s just say I put the pants on backwards because there was a little mistake on stitch count on the front when jumping from needle to needle.
Next is Frog’s jacket, which is another kind of tweedy yarn with more arm/neck holes. I thought about trying to do Toad before finishing Frog, but I decided I needed the feeling of accomplishment of getting one of them completely done before starting the other one.
Wish me luck.
What I Should Have Said 