That is entirely wonderful. *contemplates yarn stash*

Pictures that are viewable without having to get a Twitter account would be kind of nice, she said wistfully.

Here's my infundibulum in the Luttrel Psalter configuration. It doesn't just take years off of my appearance—it removes entire centuries.

Note that it's also quite warm, and doesn't get in my way when I'm looking over my shoulder. As a cyclist, I have to say that I value both of these traits enormously.

Ulrika @2:

I'll go take some better ones (the tweets weren't very good anyway), stick them on my Flickr account, and change the links in the entry.

Give me about half an hour.

Okay, so two questions to see if I've understood the directions correctly:

1. Ideally that first run of scrap yarn should begin with a provisional cast on to make subsequent removal easier, yes?

and

2. Is there any compelling reason to actually cast off the top of the neck tube when switching to the cape, rather than just put those stitches on a stitch holder or section of scrap yarn until ready to get back to them?

Lovely yarn, abi!

It's also nice that the infundibulum, although similarly versatile, is at heart in direct contrast to the thneed.

(FYI, I don't have a Twitter account, but was able to view the Twitter pic on Chrome but not on Firefox, running Ubuntu.)

The original post has been updated to link to a set of infundibulum photos in my Flickr photostream.

Awesome. contemplates lacy options

@Ulrika #5: There's no real necessity to provisionally cast off the top of the neck at all (i.e. it can be finished before knitting the shoulder cape), unless yarn is in short supply and one prefers to make the cape as long as possible. But yes, the stitches can be placed on a holder, preferably a flexible one, or a length of scrap yarn until one is ready to proceed. :)

Oh, goodness, that's a lovely object and a delightful knitting pattern. I do like Teresa's way with instructions and recipes.

Oh right, so it's basically a knitted hood!
Thats cool.
It also reminds me of someone who liked my circa 1300 woollen hood, copied the shape, but then felted it altogether so instead it became a shoulder, neck and head fitting pixie hood type thing, weird but good in its own way.

Thanks! Visible pictures, much better. Cool yarn, cool project. Now I kinda wish the title of the post were "Knitting ad infundibulum," though, cause that's the way I just misread it...

Pretty! Um, how much yarn does it generally take to make one? I have most of a hank of reclaimed-sari-silk yarn that turned out to be unsuitable for kumihimo; I'd been thinking of making a scarf with the remainder (because that's about the level on which I knit), but something like this I might actually wear.

Pondering what pattern category this would fit in for adding the pattern record to Ravelry's database. Miscellaneous headgear?

It would definitely fall in the "recipe" style of pattern instructions. (I like pattern recipes.)

Worsted-weight yarn? Given the 96 stitches and all...

Hmmmm.

"...you’ll look like Vogue Knitting Meets the Très Riches Heures du Duc du Berry. Alas, it’s not a joke that many people will get."

You'll be amused to know that my copy of Très Riches Heures du Duc du Berry is next my copies of Vogue Knitting.

Can't wait to dig through the stash!

And that reminds me that someone recently added a crocheted jacket pattern to Ravelry that has a liripipe. (Jehanne hooded cardigan, if anyone's curious.)

Naturally, this also means that if you take that same infundibulum, roll up the tube starting at the top, stick your head through the doughnut thus formed, and flip the shoulder cape over to one side, you’ll look like Vogue Knitting Meets the Très Riches Heures du Duc du Berry. Alas, it’s not a joke that many people will get.

... but those that get it will be wholeheartedly appreciative, and snicker for hours!

Oh, it looks rather like a snood (a funny word if there was one), but much less likely to fall off and accidentally backcomb my hair. Excellent idea.

abi, I do love the yarn you used, especially the colour -- do you remember what it is?

forgot the name @17:

Teresa knit it for me, actually. When she's got time to swing by the thread I'm sure she can tell you. I know it's merino, and that she found it at a charity shop significantly lacking in clue about the value of it.

Note that it weighs just over 8 oz/230 g, if that's helpful for anyone trying to calculate how much yarn it uses.

Reminds me somewhat of something I made from a piece of French terrycloth from my stash, black slubbed on one side and grey loops on the other. It was about 72" by 24"; I just flat-felled the selvedges together and finished the edges to make a big loop. The size makes it very versatile -- I can wear it as a single loop, double loop, tucked through itself, as a hood-plus-scarf, as a shoulder wrap, with one or the other color showing or both.

Deborah Green @14: You win, because I have no copy of Vogue Knitting.

I am still fairly proud of the time I used my copy of the Tres Riches Heures to help explain to a five-year-old why astronomical spring didn't necessarily mean it was warm enough to go without a sweater.

OK, now ya dun it. I just joined Ravelry.

forgot the name @ #17

It's not a snood: it's a coif, but knitted with wool instead of mail.

Moose @ #22 - Yes, well, apparently knitting wool coifs and then spray-painting them silver is an old costumers trick for providing cheap chain mail coifs. I've seen someone on the historical costuming mailing list claim that the all the mail in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is made that way...

Usually stage-faked chain mail is knit cotton twine, as it's cheaper and even more widely available (every hardware store) than wool. It takes paint easily and doesn't felt if the wearer is sweaty and active.

Monty Python's mail is obviously knit.

A snood is generally considered a hair-gather-er, such as the wide mesh ones Melanie wore in "Gone With the Wind".

I thought coifs were usually a close fitting cap made of linen or cotton and worn by married women in the Middle Ages or under a wimple by nuns.

I'd describe this as a cowl or a hood. It's going to be fun to knit....

25
Men wore something like that under their armor, as padding and protection for their heads. It was certainly called a coif.

PurpleGirl, #25: The word is used for both that and the chain-mail hood; do a Google image search on "coif" and you'll see examples of each. (Not linking the search myself, because that would bring out the Gnomes and make work for the mods.)

Lee @ #12 - I'll be surprised if one hank/skein will be enough to do more than the neck section. I've gone through just about two skeins now knitting two held together (with two slightly different yarns to get a tweedy effect) to get a tube almost as long as my head, and while finer yarns go farther than fatter ones, so a single skein ought to go farther than two, held double, I don't think you could get by with less than two skeins to get the shoulders covered at all. I'm guessing three or more to get something as long as Abi's, but no doubt it will depend on the yarn and yardage per skein.

LinD, worth joining Ravelry just for the pattern and yarn databases alone. Everything else is icing on the cake.

Slight confusion. The significantly undervalued thrift shop yarn -- three skeins of Noro Taiyo z06 -- was made into the first infundibulum. Abi's was made from one great big skein of hand-painted merino wool. I want to say it it was Cherry Tree Hill, but I'm not certain that that's what it was.

Apologies; I got the wrong end of the stick there.

(And it only occurred to me later that some people might be bothered by being given something knit from undervalued thrift-shop yarn, whereas I find the ideal charming and neat.)

I wore it out for the first time yesterday, to Mass. The bishop was visiting, so Team Medieval-Descended Glorious Clothing was out in force.

The weather continues autumnal, and it's clearly my default neckwear at the moment, so it's going to be zooming around on a bike for the forseeable future.

Thank you again for making it for me, Teresa.

Regarding nomenclature:

It's a funnel-shaped garment, so infundibulum is a good descriptive term. However, when talking about how it's worn I'd probably call it a capuch, a word I learned among the Carmelites. It's the name for the combination hood and shoulder cape that this fellow (Saint Peter of Alcantara) is wearing.

(And yes, a gentleman wearing it can suitably be referred to as a capuccino, which doesn't so much invite the whole "I like my men like I like my coffee" trope as give it a front door key and free run of the fridge.)

abi @33: Coworker: "Jacque, are you choking?" Me: "I'm, um, not choking, but thanks."

I made one of those things out of rabbit hide when I was in high school. Need to make a new one; there's about two weeks out of the year when I need something like that, but when I need it, I REALLY NEED IT.

Need to make new mittens, too.

Regarding Abi's comment this look takes centuries off the age, that is my precise experience with, say, the Anglo-Saxon headrail, or various wimples. I do some medieval recreation, and everyone looks a decade younger in a headcovering that starts under the chin. I don't understand it, but I like it!

I have added this to my Ravelry queue, and plan to start on it tonight.

abi, #33: In the Brother Cadfael mysteries, that kind of headgear is referred to as a "capuchon". Different forms of the same word in different cultures...

Cat9, #35: At a guess, this might be because it hides the sagging-under-the-jaw which is one of the hallmarks of aging. Young people have tight jawlines (unless they are significantly overweight); older people as a rule don't (although some can maintain them via cosmetic surgery).

Back in my stage fencing days, I wore bits of knitted mail at times. It was not wool (if it was, I would have been much itchier).

One of the coifs had Kevin Kline's nametag in (former Public Theater props?). Swoon!

Lee @36: I think you're onto something. Probably a combination of covering both under the jaw and the hair, since hair is often also an indicator of age. Despite that, I don't feel like they'll be coming back into fashion anytime soon. (And now watch the Vogue spring issue be dedicated to wimples...)

Glanced at the title, misread it as "Kritling an infundibulum."

AKICIML: The good news is that I'm taking custody of a cat on Oct. 22. The bad news is that I'm required to keep my door open when I'm on dorm duty, and said cat is able to leap short baby gates in a single bound. How can I keep the cat in my apartment? (Of course, I do live in a boys' dorm, so the cat might decide that his territory is big enough TYVM.)

When you're on dorm duty, keep him in the bedroom?

Congrats on feline acquisition!

Stacked baby gates?

TexAnne #40: Congratulations! I suppose the dorm maintenance would object if you added a storm door to your doorway...?

texanne @40 - i've seen tension-mounted screen doors that might be what you need. google gave me no obvious one-true-product to link to, but searching for "removable screen door" should give you a good place to start. the utility of this suggestion depends on whether your cat will be content with the barrier or attempt to claw his way out.

Obviously my subconscious posted this here because knitters always have cats, instead of the open thread where more people would have seen it. *facepalm*

Stacked baby gates, maybe, but they have holes that are juuust the right size for pawholds. I already asked the maintenance guys about putting in an interior storm door, and the head guy laughed and said no. Maybe the smelly soccer shoes in the hall will be enough of a deterrent. The bedroom door doesn't shut convincingly, since it's got a shoe-holder full of shoes on one side and a shoe-holder full of yarn on the other. OTOH his current person tells me he's a cuddler, so he might be more interested in my lap than the wide world. Which would be okay with me.

oh, another thing to try would be static shock pads - looks like the brand name is "ScatMat", but i swear they mean "shoo" and not "poop". they're normally set on furniture or over cords and deliver a small shock when the pet walks on them. a friend of mine had some for his ferret - you could set one in the open doorway or in front of the baby gate and hope he doesn't just learn to jump over from farther away. :)

shadowsong, thanks, that could be useful. Oh, or I bet I could put double-stick tape on the gate!

It's a shirt, it's a sock, it's a glove, it's a hat!

"Maybe the smelly soccer shoes in the hall will be enough of a deterrent." For some cats they would actually be an attraction.

TexAnne: If all else fails, put a harness on the cat and tether him to the bedpost. Don't attempt this with only a collar, as he's liable to get athletic and hang himself.

Teresa @ 31:

I asked because the colour looked familiar. Going from the Ravelry project pages, I was able to narrow likely candidates to Cherry Tree Hill's Misty Moor or Martha's Vineyard.

I'm now envisioning a version where the bottom edge of the cape ends in long dags edged in fractally-increased ruffles. A sort of Crocheted Coral Reef meets Mrs. Arnofini's Sleeves. I think you'd have to start by departing at regular intervals from the edge to cast on the spine of the dags in an out-and-return fashion. I don't know technical terminology for how to do it. I've been knitting since I was 10 years old and have never really managed to master the pattern language -- I know all the moves but not what to call them or how to turn instructions into them. (This is not a request for help -- if I ever felt I needed to know, I would have learned. I have a lot more fun reinventing the wheel when I feel the need for a wheel.)

Heather Rose Jones @52--That wouldn't require much fiddling. There are several stitch patterns, some of them lace patterns, that make dags.

Heather Rose Jones @52: Or you could go all Flamenco on your cape with hyperplanes.

TexAnne @45: Obviously my subconscious posted this here because knitters always have cats[..]

I thought it was cats that had knittens.

Allan, #49: Oh, yes. One of our cats is very fond of stinky sneakers -- as in, has been known to go to sleep nose-down in one!

Re: TexAnne's new kitteh and FaultyMemory's @ 50: I second the suggestion of a harness rather than a collar...but I once owned a cat (Maurice) who managed on more than one occasion to back out of his harness whilst it was leashed to a support column in the back yard.

Of course, the cat didn't go too far: the dog distracted him into chasing said dog around the back yard.

Apologies for off-topic-ness, but I thought the harness thing should be mentioned. The trick is to make it tight enough to be impervious to tugging but not so tight it hurts the kitteh. Obviously, I never found the right balance with Maurice.

Re: cats and harnesses -

Every cat I've ever put into a harness has turned its bones into jello and oozed out of the restraint and gotten up under whatever I was trying to keep it out of.

The smaller the cat, the more gelatinous the skeleton, it seems.

And this is why Annie doesn't have leash privileges in the yard any more.

Rob Rusick @55: I thought it was cats that had knittens.

One night, back in the last millenium, I was helping out with a production of MPR's Shockwave Radio. Jerry Stearns and DavE Romm were the regular crew on staff that night.

We read the script for the skit DavE had written, played a tape (might have been Hitchhiker's Guide), and the show noodled along.

Then, we had five minutes to kill to keep time, so Jerry started riffing on about the Ronco Kitten Knitter™.

See, it's this appliance that goes around your house and vacuums up all the dust that accumulates under the furniture. It knits the dust into kittens and releases them. They then gambol about your home until they disolve into dust again.

This was live, mind you. I did manage to say quite through his whole monologue, but I swear, I sprained something in the effort.

Thena, #58 et al: Dog-style harnesses don't work at all for cats. You want to get what's called a "figure-8" harness. It's a single piece of cord with a metal slider for size adjustment; the cord goes thru the slider, makes a loop, and comes back, and there's a clip on the short end. In use, the loop goes over the cat's head and the short end goes around the body just behind the forelegs and clips back to the slider, which sits between the cat's shoulder blades. The long end is your leash and handle. When properly adjusted, it's very hard for a cat to wriggle out of this.

Figure-8 harnesses are hard to find -- most pet stores don't carry them, probably because most people don't put harnesses on their cats. The one I have is ancient; I got it with my first cat, the only one I've ever had who would walk with me on a leash.

Heather @52, Fidelio @53 -- I myself was considering a feather-and-fandibulum. Feather-and-fan (AKA old shale) gives good scallop.

(For the crocheted coral reef look, maybe if you knit the edging on perpendicularly to the bottom of the infundibulum, with as many short rows as needed to give good hyperplanar ruffle?)

Texanne - "knitters always have cats" - Well, yes. Even if the personalities didn't work that way, you're playing with string, so the cats will show up.

Meanwhile, you've got a kitten and "The bedroom door doesn't shut convincingly, since it's got[...] a shoe-holder full of yarn" - How can you not add a webcam to this process? Other people will watch your kitten for you! The possibilities are pretty much endless, even if you don't franchise it out to the Cheezeburger Network.

@Lee - The harness in question was in fact a figure-8 type on its tightest setting. It had worked fine for the late lamented #1 Cat on our 2005 cross-country road trip, but Annie melted out of it last summer and got up into the neighbors' shrubbery and had to be lured out with the Amazing Red Laser Dot.

We are /not/ doing that again, no matter what she tells me.

And, to wrangle it back to topic, I wonder whether a very small knitted infundibulum could be made to suffice as a cat harness? You'd have to rig some way to keep it behind the victim's elbows...

I have a fabric, constructed wimple that I made for my SCA garb, BUT it also proves handy in Real Cold weather. It looks like the infundibulum but is a rough cotton broadcloth fabric. I'm a very warm person in general, so it didn't get worn much once I made it. And it is a lot less elegant,

Cats and smelly -- Siegfried (TexAnne has met him) loves smelly, from shoes to, urm, panties. And socks. H will sometimes scooch smelly fabric objects under the beds.

Blessings that you have a kitten. the boys may prove useful in keeping it in your apartment, I hope that works!

He's full-grown, not a kitten. Which is fine. I keep forgetting to ask how old he is, but he's pretty young, I think.

I remembered that cats hate having sticky paws, so now I'm considering getting two baby gates, stacking them vertically, and putting contact paper sticky-side-out. Unless he launches himself completely over the 4' gate, he'll have to touch Teh Ebil Stickeh.

...oh, crud. I just realized I have a small bookshelf right beside the door, exactly where an enterprising young fellow might use it as a launch pad. SIGH.

Siegfried is only four years old. And sometimes still acts like a kitten-idiot.

Like last week, one of the outdoor evil black cats was outside lurking on the porch when I got home from work. Siggie tried to rush out to defend (read 'get severely lacerated, maybe even a vet trip to fix...") as I opened the door. I caught him by all the loose skin I could grab and dragged him back into the house.

The outdoor cats were, at one time, fully-sexed fighting tomcats. an effort by the neighbor to neuter everyone resulted in no kittens but adult cats that think they still have balls and fight as if they do.

I am sitting in my very cold office at work wearing the infundibulum that TNH gifted to me. I am happy to be wearing it, as I'm freezing. Though I wish there was an inside pocket for ones's hands.

And Abi's Infundibulum looks very much to be Cherry Tree Hill in the Martha's Vineyard colorway.

I finally got some pictures posted of my first first knitted infundibulum. It has a few issues that will no doubt sort themselves with subsequent iterations -- ribbing not deep enough to prevent rolling, fabric too heavy for drapey effects -- but for keeping my neck and shoulders warm while working in a cold office, it is sovereign. Pictures may be viewed here.

That's lovely, Ulrika! And oh-so-chic on the doggie.

Due to time constraints and lateness, I will be embarking on an infindibulum (rather than a more fitted and finicky garment) as soon as I've spun and plied enough of the wool. The hope is to have it done in time to show off at our local yarn-n-fiber shop's St. Distaff's Day (Rock Day) potluck.

Spinning singles goes very quickly when done in front of a YouTube playist of The Muppet Show. John and I got through most of Season One last night, and I filled most of a Schacht Matchless bobbin. (I presume John got through a good amount of his personal coding project.)

If the wool is any indication, it's going to be lovely and warm and oh-so-soft.

Good luck me!

I got my usual daily email from WEBS, and they have, today, a [free] pattern from Berroco for a "cowl" that's clearly an infundibulum. link:
https://www.berroco.com/sites/default/files/downloads/patterns/Berroco-Oasis.pdf

The shoulder shaping may be useful.