I have no idea how I found this, but it's easily the worst knitted item I've seen since the Bella womb. If you don't know what that means, for God's sake don't Google it.
The following is the complete article, with my horrified analysis below.
What the fuck. I don't know where to begin.
I complained about it to a friend in an IM chat.
fuzzknot: I think I need help
fuzzknot: (no cheap shots)
fuzzknot: I mean, where do I BEGIN on a project like this? http://daddytypes.com/2007/07/04/my_mom_handknit_an_iphone.php
X: hahaha, fine no cheap shots
fuzzknot: . . . I noticed that since I said "no cheap shots," you've remained mysteriously silent.
Precisely. You know it's bad when it gives me pause. Hell, the title of that article alone gave me pause. "My mom hand knit an iPhone." That is odd enough to begin with, but the praise that follows is far more bizarre. Normally, a title like that would be followed with face palming expressions of embarrassment and typical my-parents-are-so-lame observations.
The author describes his mom as "insanely cool": I couldn't help but wonder if it were an intentional echo of Steve Jobs' famous '"insanely great." How about just saying "insane" about the pair of them and stopping there?
I did agree with the author on at least one point, the first one being the phrase "disaster waiting to happen." That sounds about right. Also, he said "Frankly, I think it's cooler than the Steve Jobs version." Frankly, I agree. Well. Frankly, I don't give a damn; this is about bad knitting, not bad fads that can't die fast enough.
Now. The article begins with an image of a knitted Pop Tart cell phone cozy, which in itself says something alarming about the direction this project is headed. Knitted food is stupid, and knitted cell phone sweaters are worse. Don't put your phones in sweaters, y'all; phones were engineered to emit a certain amount of heat in order to function. I'd rather have my phone get scratched up than overheat and break.
Next, the author states his mom "tested a variety of yarns to get the best gauge." I'm sure she did, but she still failed. The gauge is too big, and the phone itself is too big as a result. Apparently her gauge was 15 stitches at 6 per inch, but obviously it wasn't accurate, otherwise the end result wouldn't have been noticeably larger than the real phone. But even without the gauge problem, the stitches themselves are still too big. Small projects need smaller stitches, and the knitted phone should have had a considerably finer gauge than it did, possibly even felted. As it is, it just looks awkward. Also, the problem of having the screen not "look quite right" could be solved with a little more effort, or better still, a lot less effort by not making the damn thing in the first place.
Now we come to the icons, which is where this knitted atrocity really starts to suck. I mean look at it. What the fuck. Those icons took, what, all of five minutes to make? Oh holy shit, she spent three hours on them? Dude, I spent three hours last night swatching patterns for a scarf I'm making for a friend, ripping out and redoing before I got it right. Point being, three hours of work should yield decent results. It's all about trial and error: Be a perfectionist, rip it out and redo it until you get it right, and for God's sake don't post photos of knitting fuck ups on the Internet to be mocked savagely by snarky stagehands with nothing better to do than feed their superiority complexes. Ahem. The point is, if it's clearly not good enough, don't just leave it. As Napoleon said, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well. Granted, this phone was not worth knitting, but if you decide it is, you should damn well do the best job you can do. I suck at sewing and could do a better job than that.
Of course, part of the crappiness of the buttons can be blamed on the author who didn't pay attention when his mom asked him about where to place the buttons, but that doesn't change that she could have aligned them better. The same goes for the sewing. The seams of that knitted phone are all over the place. I cannot believe how terrible the edges of that phone look. Some of that may have had to do with the unevenness of the fabric itself, which in turn I blame on the fact that she only spent half an hour on the knitting itself. I knit much more slowly than that. I'm a slow knitter for a reason: I'm a good knitter. As I've repeatedly said on this page and elsewhere in Bad Knitting, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well. Otherwise, don't bother; or at the very least, don't pollute the Internet with terrible pictures to spread the false idea that knitting badly is okay. It's not. It's an art. We don't need lousy shit like this to give our already-dorky hobby a bad name.