Sheep On My Stuff

I am SheepLass, a knitter in her late 20s who is madly and wildly in love with her husband. :) I have many hobbies: reading, writing, playing World of Warcraft, exercising, puttering about on the Internet... but I am also a collector of sheep and a knitter, and here I shall combine those hobbies by knitting things and blogging about them, complete with companion pictures of Sheep On My Stuff.

Conventional wisdom often holds that knitting skipped a generation -- our grandmothers did it because everyone knit back then (indeed, during WW1 literally everyone knit; machine-knit socks were a newfangled thing of the future, so if you weren't fighting, you were knitting woollen socks to send overseas), our mothers skipped it because they were too busy fighting for women's lib/associated it with years of staying at home whether you wanted to or not/etc., and then we're picking it up again because it's damn fun, and it's not every hobby that nets you handmade sweaters, socks, and holiday/birthday gifts.

This is true for me; my great-grandmother on my dad's side knit and crocheted, and my grandmother on my mom's side crocheted. My mom does counted-cross-stitch, which I do as well, and I can certainly crochet (I started out with that and learned to knit later), but mostly I knit. I started in May 2001 when my husband and I bought our first condo, and haven't stopped.

Now, as for the sheep... I've been collecting sheep since summer 1997 (with one bonus sheep my mom got me in 1992, because she is prescient as well as a genius). Most knitters start knitting first and develop a love of all things woollen (including the animals from which wool comes) afterward, but I think my love of knitting may have been inspired by the fact that I could use a sheep product in the craft.

I am allergic to mohair and alpaca. I cannot imagine how devastated I would be if I were allergic to wool!

The origin of my love of sheep is this: Years ago there was a computer game called "Worms". In this game, your intrepid team of worms used a variety of weapons to destroy other teams of worms. We're not talking about balls of dirt, here; we're talking about bazookas, shotguns, dynamite and land mines.

And sheep.

Sheep were an explosive device that ranked among the most powerful in the game. If you picked up an ammo crate containing a sheep, your opponents were in trouble. If you also got the double-damage bonus (which popped up a message reading "SHEEP ARE NOW SUPER STRENGTH!"), your opponents were doomed. A single well-placed sheep could easily take out an entire squadron of enemy worms, bleating woolly death at them all the way. ("Baa... baa... BOOM!")

I was enchanted by the juxtaposition of woolly, cuddly cuteness and FIERCE BLEATING DOOM! I found a plush sheep at a grocery store that summer, and from there on it just sort of...

Well. At the height of my collection (when my collection included ceramic sheep, metal sheep, sheep containers, candles in the shapes of sheep, and other sheep things as well as plus sheep) I had well over 700 sheep items. I've cut down since then, but let's just say I'll have sheep to pose with my knitting for a very, very long time before I have to start repeating sheep.

Happy knitting, and my sheep and I will see you around the blog!