Look, Ma, I got my N7 stripes!

I should really be writing about faeries and circuses at the moment, but instead I’m staring at my knitting and attempting to make myself awesome Mass Effect-inspired paraphernalia. Priorities, right?

Sorry, I’m not sorry.

There’s something about BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy that puts it at the top of my favorite video games of all time list, and I really can’t pinpoint it to just one particular thing. The story was phenomenal, the characters were amazing, the locations enormously grand and detailed, the fighting system and graphics get better after every subsequent game within the trilogy. The story revolves around Commander Shepard and her (FemShep all the way!) fight against the mega-powerful Reapers across the galaxy.

Throughout the game, Shepard acquires allies and resources to help her fight the good fight, and in turn also experiences the red tape surrounding an inter-species bureaucracy (and gosh, her other enemies are frustratingly maniacal!). There was clearly a lot of work put into this sci-fi game, from species creation to worldbuilding and background histories, and to me, the entire trilogy hit it out of the ballpark (that says multitudes, considering BioWare’s other currently popular franchise, Dragon Age, has had hits and many, many misses so far).

But enough about my gushing. This is about my gloves. Which, funnily enough, sport the Alliance military’s N7 stripes.

Darn right I do!

Realistically speaking, I’d fail the first part of training. In the ME universe, an N-designation of any kind is roughly the equivalent of having joined the Marines and passed the arduous training regimes. N-6 probably equates to the Navy Seals, and N-7 goes beyond that, because by that point, the person with that designation is considered special forces. So, you know, not something I could physically do.

But that’s alright, because I totally got Shepard’s back. Yep.

It took some time framing the gloves, because I wanted to find a basic fingerless pattern that I could alter by putting a vertical colored stripe in the middle. I decided I’d do the pattern I’ve been doing, because honestly, it was my favorite one, and it was described pretty well for, you know, someone who only started a few months back. Not so hard, right? Well, then there’s the location of the stripe to worry about as well, because the way I did it, the placement was different from the right hand to the left, and so some math was required.

For those interested, the beginning pattern is as follows:

Materials:

• 1 skein of each: black yarn, white yarn, red yarn–preferably something soft like Caron, but I didn’t have those handy, so I went for what I had
• circular knitting needles or 4 dpns (don’t ask me for any more details, because I didn’t write those down…)

Directions:

Cast on 36 stitches. Split them into three of the dpns, using the fourth as your working needle.
1×1 ribbing (k1, p1) for 20 rounds

Right hand:
k24 black, k1 white, k2 red, k1 white, k until end
repeat for 22 rounds

Left hand:
k12 black, k1 white, k2 red, k1 white, k until end
repeat for 22 rounds

Increases: I pretty much followed the rest of this pattern, with the changes I made above. So, yeah. That 😀

(Yes, this is me being lazy and not wanting to explain the rest).

Some kinks still needing to be worked out when I do gloves, but I’m taking a break from glove-knitting to make myself an N7-striped scarf that matches!

Again, sorry, I’m not sorry.