Bunny Hop Blanket

This is the pattern that inspired me to learn how to knit.  It was sometime in mid-2007.  I had learned to crochet in fall of 2006, but quickly discovered that the patterns I was most attracted to were for knitting.  Crochet seemed so coarse and chunky compared to the soft drape of knitted fabric.  So when I came across the Bunny Hop blanket pattern, I knew I just had to learn how to knit.

I went out and bought myself a Learn-To-Knit book and some needles, grabbed some yarn (probably a boucle or eyelash, knowing me at the time) from my then-meager stash, and set down to figure it out.  How hard could this be? I thought.

While the book had plenty of pictures, it was incredibly limited in scope, showing only one cast-on and the English (throwing) style of holding the yarn.  There was no mention of long-tail caston or cable caston or even that there were multiple methods of casting on, depending on your project.  There was no mention of different styles of holding the yarn.   Having come from a crochet background, I was used to holding yarn in my left hand.  Now I was supposed to hold it in my right, juggle a pair of needles instead of one hook, and work these crazy stitches while sometimes holding the yarn in the front, sometimes in the back.  It was a disaster.  I’m pretty sure there were tears and many curses involved.

Then I got the brilliant idea to find a video of someone knitting.  This led me to Knitting Help, without which I probably never would have knitted a single stitch.  There I discovered something called “Continental” method, in which you hold the yarn in your [proper] left hand and pick it into your knit stitches, instead of throwing it around the needle.  I learned that there were no fewer than five caston methods, and actually several more.  Before I knew it, fabric was coming off of my needles.  I was knitting!

Of course, I tried to make this pattern right away.  And it was a disaster.  The pattern tells you to “knit your knit stitches and purl the purl stitches” on the wrong side rows.  Well, that was confusing.  Did that mean I knitted into stitches that I had knit on the opposite side (effectively knitting the purl stitches and vice versa)?  Or did that mean I knitted into stitches that looked like knit stitches?  And what did a knit stitch look like, anyway?  Then I accidentally pulled about 20 of the 125 stitches off the needle.  Of course this was an unrecoverable error for a newbie knitter, but since I was only 5 rows in I dutifully ripped it out and cast on again.  And then I dropped a stitch.  And then I got a knot.  It seemed like this pattern was just not in the cards.  So I quit and went on to something else, a proper scarf – which is where you’re supposed to start with knitting, apparently.

Several scarves, dishcloths, cabled afghans, socks, felted projects (some intentionally, some not), a top, a few hats, two pairs of mittens, and some household knitting projects later, and I’ve come back to the Bunny Hop.  A good friend and his wife are expecting, and this seemed like the perfect time to try knitting my inspiration again.  And as they say, third time’s a charm.

Here’s the right side, where I’ve just started a third skein:

The yarn is actually a very dark shade of purple, but the lighting was a little wonky for these pictures and here it looks much lighter and redder than it really is. I’ve completed one and one-half repeats so far (a repeat is about 36 rows). At first the pattern didn’t look like anything at all, but now I see the reverse stockinette diamonds with moss stitch and stockinette diamonds inside/inbetween them.

The pattern is reverse on the back side:

This yarn was originally purchased for an afghan for my niece (post coming soon). I had six skeins left over, which is exactly enough yarn for this project. Isn’t it wonderful when a plan comes together?

Circular Place Mats

I made these cotton place mats as a Christmas gift for my mom. She lives in Florida now, and done in a bright yellow yarn, they remind me of the Sunshine State.

The pattern comes from “Traditional Victorian Whitework To Knit & Crochet for the Home” and is simply called Circular Place Mats. It is surprisingly easy, worked over no more than 25 stitches at a time.   Short rows and yarn overs make the spiral pattern.  I knitted these with Sugar’n Cream cotton in yellow.

The pattern picture shows a closed center hole, but when I tried doing that it looked very sloppy. So I just left the small hole in the center. It looks better that way.

Mom has a hexagonal table, so I made her a set of six placemats.

As soon as she got back to Florida after the holidays, she sent me a photo of her new placemats on their table.

A few days later, she said they had visitors for dinner and one of their friends asked where she had bought them.

I am pretty sure that’s supposed to be a compliment.  🙂

Cabled Afghan

I finished my sister’s afghan late last year, practically a year behind schedule.  It seemed more important to take my time and do a good job than to rush through just to meet an arbitrary deadline.  But after a year and some months, it was really a relief to have it done.  This project wasn’t difficult, but it was ambitious, especially for a scatterbrained/ attention-deficit-suffering knitter such as myself.  Truth be told, it languished for weeks at a time, sometimes even longer.  Once I got two or three pattern repeats on the needles (a repeat was 50 rows!) it got too big to take anywhere.  I finally had to go out of town for a weekend with some knitting friends to get it finished.  But it’s done, and the recipient is very pleased.  Sorry, sis- I didn’t mean for your wedding gift to be an anniversary present, but I do hope you like it.

I used KnitPick’s Wool of the Andes Worsted in “Mink Heather” for this project.

Content: 100% Peruvian Highland Wool
Weight: Worsted Weight
Gauge: 4.5 – 5 sts = 1″ on #6 – 9 needles (4.0mm-5.5mm)
Amount: 110 yards/50 gram ball
Care: Hand Wash/Dry Flat

WotA is incredibly reasonably priced (1.99 a ball x 20 skeins is a bargain) but I have to say that you get what you pay for.  My initial feeling was that this very good yarn for the money, but as the afghan grew and took on weight, it wasn’t as great as I first thought.  The knitted fabric felt thin for worsted, even though I got gauge on size 9s.  The finished afghan seemed almost see-through, blocked slightly stretched per the pattern instructions.

But while the yarn is on the thin side, it is of excellent quality.  I worked 19 and one half skeins and encountered exactly one knot.   So while I am not really disappointed in the yarn, I don’t think I would use it again for an afghan, unless held double.  It would probaby be good for clothing since it does have a nice drape and good stitch definition.

As for the pattern, I don’t have a single bad thing to say, other than it’s written kind of awkwardly.  I was lucky enough to find someone on Ravelry who had made an Excel spreadsheet of the pattern, which was incredibly useful.

Happy wedding, sis!

3/20

My sister’s wedding afghan is moving along. It’s slow work, but enjoyable. I have been averaging about 2 rows a day. At this rate, I will finish in approximately 136 days. That’s a real outside number, of course. At some point, I will panic and begin knitting furiously, finishing up on Christmas Eve just as she’s pulling in the driveway. We’re good like that, though.

So far, I’ve worked 2 1/2 of the 20 balls of Wool of the Andes. I really like this yarn. For $1.99 a skein, it’s great stuff. Can’t attest yet to the durability, but the workability is top-notch. It’s slightly stretchy, just as you would expect, but holds together very well. I haven’t had any problem with splitting or snagging. In fact, it’s one of the nicer wools I’ve worked with.

Since I am a novice at cabling, the metal fishhook-shaped cable needle was a disaster. Instead, I am using a wooden DPN one size larger than my project needles. This keeps the stitches to be twisted snug and firm. On my fishhook cable needle, they kept wanting to slide off while they were being twisted, or else they were a complete pain to get off when I was working them. Yuck. I like the chunkier feel of the larger needle, and the straight DPN handles much better than that weird hook did, for my taste.

I alo like the DPN for the knot of the large cable pattern. This calls for you to slip 6 stitches, once worked, from the right needle to a cable needle. You then wrap the yarn 4 times counterclockwise around the stitches, then slip them back to the right needle and continue on your merry way. It makes a very interesting “knot” and is a great detail in the cable pattern. You can see it in the upper center of this picture:

All in all, I’m pleased with this pattern and with the yarn. More progress reports soon.

What Do You Mean, “Normal People Don’t Knit Wool Afghans in the Summertime”?

My sister has decided to get married on the spur of the moment. Well, actually, that’s not true. She decided earlier this year that she was getting married. What she did NOT decide, dear reader, was to set a date. Until last month. And the date is in just two weeks.

When she announced that she and her betrothed were, indeed, betrothed, sis and I discussed the idea of me making a lovely afghan for their wedding gift. She was all for the idea. I set about finding a nice pattern, picked out some yarn, and set to work.

It was a disaster.

The pattern I chose was called “Wedding Ring Quilt“, a crochet design from Coats & Clark based loosely on the traditional hand-sewn quilts of Early Americana vintage. I saw a few finished versions on Ravelry and was liking the mock-quilt look of the thing. But my version had a heavy hand to it. It felt more like a rug than an afghan, much less a quilt. Perhaps I had been away from crochet too long and was not used to the thicker fabric? In any case, I couldn’t bear to work on it. It was a miserable failure. To top things off, there was no date set yet for the wedding, so I didn’t have a looming calendar date to kick my ass into gear. Thus, it languished (languishes, still) in the big Afghan In Progress box.

Then, I got a phone call from my mother out of the blue, announcing that August 16 is now the magic date. Yes, August 16. One month away.

My brain works best under pressure. Without a deadline, I can’t get my act together. In fact, if it weren’t for the Last Minute, I would get nothing done. Well, here was a deadline. I scoured Ravelry for a new pattern, finally deciding to forget the whole crochet business (even though it works up much faster, I know) and go with a knitted object. And did I mention my sister is honeymooning in Ireland? Cables. Must have cables. Have I mentioned I have never really done cables before?

I finally settled on a free pattern from Lion Brand, called the Lover’s Knot Afghan. It’s pretty, and even though it has cables all the heck over it, there’s really only two different cable motifs, and they alternate across the width of the project. This means that it’s pretty easy to follow, even for a cable novice like meself.

My sister and I settled on wool, even though she is a little bit concerned about washability. I convinced her, though. And for ease of shopping plus economy, I had her choose a color from the Knit Picks Wool Of The Andes line. There are plenty of colors, it’s a decent quality wool, and for $1.99 a skein, who could go wrong? She chose the Mink Heather, which would have been my pick exactly.  (Did I mention she’s my sister?)

Days later, a lovely box of wool (20 skeins’ worth), a new set of 40″ interchangeable circular needles, and two sets of tips (9s and 8s, just in case my gauge was off) arrived in the mail.

What a happy day! I love getting packages, particularly when they’re full of yarn.

It doesn’t hurt that Knit Picks is very easy to deal with. I’ve placed two orders so far and been extremely happy with the quality, expediency, and accuracy of each.

Of course, I ripped into the box right away. Who could resist?

It was damn difficult not to just cast on right then, right there.

But I resisted. And good thing, too. Because when I did finally cast on, I learned a terrible, horrible lesson firsthand:

When using interchangeable needles, don’t trust your sweat-laced palms to tighten up the tips. Use the damn tightening key. That’s what they sent it for.

Yeah, that would be after knitting two rows over 230 stitches. Yup. The tip worked itself off and … SPROING! Many, many stitches went flying. They were not recoverable. I ripped and started over. And that was the SECOND cast-on attempt. The first try actually went swimmingly, but then I started knitting Row One with the second cable motif instead of the first, and by the time I got to the end and realized what I had done it seemed like a much better idea to just frog and cast on again, seeing as this was just the first row and all.

The THIRD cast on attempt was more successful. I am, of course, highly paranoid now about tips coming loose and all, and so I check them multiple times each row. But so far, they’re staying put. And I’m liking them. I like those nickle-plated tips.  And look at me, with about 12 rows completed:

Wish me luck. I have 19 days to finish this sucker (yeah, RIGHT.)

Diagonal Garter Dishcloth with Extra-Pointy Corners

Thanks to Ravelry, I found a modded version of the traditional diagonal-garter dishcloth. This one has instructions for making the bound-off corner (and the two corners opposite the longest row) extra-pointy, so they are more similar to the cast on edge. This also makes the final eyelets centered and the cloth more symmetrical. I like the way it turned out.

I won’t go into a lot of detail, since the pattern is pretty simple. Basically, you cast on 4 stitches, do an increase, and then keep increasing by doing a yarn over after the first two stitches and before the last two stitches of every other row. This part is important, because I did not read the directions carefully and couldn’t figure out *why* my dishcloth started out so terribly wonky. It was because I wasn’t knitting a straight row in between the increase rows. Doh.

Once we got all that sorted out, though, this is a super-fast and easy knit. It’s a great portable project, especially if you knit on circulars. Stick one in your handbag or purse and you can whip out a few rows whenever you have the chance.

I’m really bad about keeping skein wrappers, so I don’t remember the name of this colorway. But they yarn is a 100% cotton Peaches ‘N Cream by Lily. This is great dishcloth yarn. It’s slightly thick, and I find that the dishcloths I make with it are a lot bulkier than my commercial ones. Sometimes that’s a disadvantage, like when you’re trying to wash something small (like my kids’ tea set). But for most jobs, the cloth is very luxurious to use and the purl bumps of the garter rows make great scrubby surfaces.

Finished size: approx 7″ x 8″. (Yes, I know it’s not a square.)
Needles: 4.5 mm (US 7)

Weez’s Lucy Blanket

We have become close friends with a guy who works with my husband. The guy and his wife, Weez, just became grandparents for the first time about a month ago when the guy’s son and daughter-in-law had a baby girl. The parents named her Lucy, and I made this blanket for Grandma Weez to keep for when Lucy visits them.

I did this in crochet with some stashed Bernat Softee Baby yarn that I bought for just this purpose- an emergency baby gift. Well, it wasn’t really an emergency, but it sure was nice to be able to go into the stash and pull out some yarn and get started in the middle of the night.

I found the pattern on Bernat’s website after looking there for a baby blanket pattern that was suited for this yarn. Overall, I’m pleased with the pattern and the yarn, but there are a few minor things that I found annoying.

First off, the yarn is a variegated pink, purple and white. When I first started the body of the blanket, the colors worked themselves into vertical stripes. About a third of the way through the blanket, however, the stripes switched to a pattern of roughly diagonal splotches. Both patterns look nice, but together, they look like I made a mistake (or changed my mind) partway through.

The other thing I didn’t like about this yarn was that the skeins were horribly tangly for commercial center-pull balls. All three that I pulled ended up in giant knots. Also, the third skein (of which I only used about 3 yards) felt like it was coated in the same stuff they put on dryer sheets. It was slightly coarse, not soft and fluffy like the first two. It also felt like it was a heavier weight- more like a worsted than a sport/baby weight. Fortunately, it’s not noticeable in the final project.

I loved the pattern, however. The blanket body is simple and made up of V stitches (DC, ch2, DC in same st) across. It then has a simple five-row lace border. The border makes a slight ruffle, but it lies fairly flat so as not to be obnoxious.

I think the variegated yarn looks swell in the border, too.  And I love the little picots.

Here’s hoping Lucy (and Weez) will agree.

Pattern available on Bernat’s website, here. Please note that you must be a registered member (it’s free to register) of Bernat.com in order to download the pattern.

On A Roll: Textured Crochet Cloth

Wow. Two FOs in two days. What is this world coming to?

Actually, it’s deadlines that we’re coming to. If it weren’t for the last minute, I’d never get anything done.

Tomorrow, my older daughter is going to her first dance recital. I thought it would be nice [for her, via moi] to give her teacher a little gift. Come on: anyone who spends thirty minutes, five or six times a week, with three- and four- and five-year olds deserves a gift, even if she is getting paid for it. Hence, we have Ms. Virginia’s Textured Crochet Cloth.

I opted for crochet because, this being the last minute and all, I needed something that would work up fast. Crochet goes faster than knitting, unless you totally suck at it. It does use more yarn, and the fabric is generally thicker, but I made this cloth in just a couple of hours this evening, so it’s all good.

Using some Bernat Handicrafter Cotton from my stash, and a 4.00 mm hook, I chained 37 stitches and then worked a single row of sc across, starting with the second chain from the hook, for a total of 36 working stitches. To start the next row, I did a ch-1, turn, and then worked a sc in each sc crochet across. However, to give it a little more “complicated” look and a textured feel, I worked the odd stitches through the back loops and the even stitches through the front loops. Repeat this across the row, ch-1, turn, and do it all over again. And again. And… well, keep going, until it looks like a nice cloth.

To finish, I did a row of sc across the last row, then chained about 15 stitches. Work another sc in the last sc (the one before the chain) to make a loop, then work one more sc in that same stitch to round the corner.

Turn the work sideways and sc evenly across the edge. Work another 36 sc along the foundation chain’s edge, add two more sc in the last sc to turn the corner, and sc evenly across the other selvedge to the beginning of the last regular working row. Finish off, weave in the pesky ends, block, make a nice little gift tag, and… voilà! One I-Love-You-Teacher giftie, all ready for giving.

Random Note:
If you’re actually thinking of making this, and my instructions don’t seem to make sense along with these pictures, it’s because the cloth is turned over and you’re looking at what’s technically the “wrong” side. The loop on my cloth was actually in the top-left corner on the working side. This cloth is fully reversible, and I didn’t really pay attention to how I was photographing it until just now…

Better Late Than Never: Box Stitch Dishcloth

For Mother’s Day, I made another dishcloth for my dear mum, who has discovered the joy of washing dishes with a hand-knitted cloth. We happened to be together in a craft store about a month ago, and I had her pick out the yarn for her cloth. I got to pick the pattern, and opted for Box Stitch: a simple four-row pattern that results in a reversible cloth with lots of scrubby bumps.

Mom picked Lily Sugar N’ Cream in “Landscape”. The hues are a light green, light brown/dark tan, and off white.

I did a simple garter stitch border, with four rows of garter at top and bottom and four stitches of garter on each edge.

The pattern is fully reversible- a nice touch for a working dishcloth.

I am not fond of variegated yarns which have a very dark value along with lighter ones. I don’t care for the zig-zag that inevitably works up in the fabric.

However, it does add interest to an otherwise simple piece.

Yarn used: Lily Sugar n’ Cream Cotton in Landscape
Needles: US Size 4 (3.5 mm)
Worked over 46 stitches.

Finished size? eeep. I knew I forgot to do something before mailing this to Mom.

Box Stitch Cloth Pattern
Cast on a multiple of 4 + 2 stitches (i.e. 38, 42, etc).
Work 4 rows in garter stitch.
Begin pattern:
Slip the first stitch of each row, then knit the next 3 stitches, to make the 4-stich garter border. Also knit the last 4 stitches of each row.
Excluding the border stitches, work k2, *p2, k2, across row 1, then p2, *k2, p2 across row 2.
Excluding the border stitches, work p2, *k2, p2 across row 3, then k2, *p2, k2 across row 4.
Repeat the four pattern rows until desired length.
Work 4 rows in garter stitch.
Bind off, weave in ends.

Another Waffle Stitch Cloth

I just finished another waffle stitch washcloth. This one is for an online friend. She knows she’s getting a gift, but doesn’t have any idea what it is. I decided to make this for her because she recently painted her kitchen a very vibrant blue, and definitely needs a lip-smacking dishcloth to go along with it.

I really like waffle stitch for dish cloths. It’s an easy pattern, but interesting to look at. The front and back are totally different, but equally attractive. It works up quickly, and is very functional, especially with an appropriate yarn like the Lily cottons.

This particular cloth was made with Sugarn ‘N Cream in the “Sunkissed” colorway. I used a rather smallish size 4 needles, but it worked up nicely and I like the density of the fabric. Over 49 stitches cast on, I worked 4 rows of garter, 15 repeats of the waffle stitch pattern, then 4 more rows of garter before binding off. The finished cloth measures 8″w x 7 3/4″ tall.

Waffle Stitch

Cast on a multiple of 3+1 stitches, plus any border you’d like to include.

1. (RS) P1,K2. Repeat to end of row, ending with P1.
2. (WS) K1, P2. Repeat to end of row, ending with K1.
3. Repeat Row 1
4. Knit across.