Irina double majored in design and theatre, and liked to make her design project do double duty as costumes for her theatre classes. She'd worn her latest project for an avant garde piece on the standards of beauty for women, in which she'd played a cotton ball. Darcy had heard so much about "beer goggles" that she came up with her own version: knitting goggles. They came in handy when she didn't happen to feel like darning in ends. Maureen was so pleased that she had managed to get through design school without ever having had to learn to knit. After all, she thought, she was a designer, not a crafter, and a true designer can do wonders with thrift store afghans. Hermione was so thrilled that after a two-year moratorium on buying yarn, she had finally used the very last dregs of her stash. She celebrated with a ceremony, attended by her cats, in which she crowned herself Stash Princess. Keara had had to make an unusually large number of swatches to nail down the tension for her design project, but in the end she found it had been totally worth it. Jolene had made her final project for design school out of several bathmats and fuzzy toilet seat covers. In the written abstract she'd had to submit with it, she'd said it gave one that "just got out of the shower and had taken a good pee feeling", and pointed out that it was also very absorbent. Her instructor had scribbled, "These are not selling points," and given her a D, but Jolene knew her vision just wasn't one that could be appreciated by the masses. Yet. Lucinda had made it her life's work as a designer to a campaign to make the granny square look chic, and she was determined to stay on message no matter how many runway models wound up looking utterly miserable in the process. As a dedicated terrarium hobbyist, Gretchen was thrilled to find a way to take her work with her wherever she went. Though she still had to figure out a way to attach the glass covers to her sleeves. Lynn had designed her new cloak to look like a representation of an insect under a microscope, and wore it with a costume that she hoped looked like one that was native to a country where they still had malaria, although she hadn't had time to look up which specific countries those were and what their national costumes looked like. However, as Lynn reminded herself, when you're trying to save countless innocent insects from slaughter, it's important to not get bogged down in trivial details. Thea found she could use up her stash so more quickly if she knitted with the entire skein rather than just a strand from it.