Blagger » Crafts

Our home-knit blanket has earned itself a third colour

Nik — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:19:14 +0000

Our blanket of two colours is now a blanket of three. Well, not quite a blanket, of course, as it’s not all sewn together, but the red and blue squares have now been joined by muted green, and it’s coming along rather nicely.

The blue ones, mysteriously, are still generally larger than the reds and greens, despite being the same wool on the same needles. I suspect that’s going to make stitching them all together a bit… ‘interesting’.

I’m now pretty much half way through, having used one ball of each colour, with one ball of each colour left. The question is, do I stick with just three colours, or buy some more wool in the same range and add a fourth – perhaps a deep cream to make it a third as large again?

Home-knit blanket

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Now I’m knitting a blanket

Nik — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:09:57 +0000

After the success of the home-knit scarf (so soft, so warm) I’m trying my hand at a blanket. I was tempted to do a hat but I thought that was a bit optimistic for a novice like me, and I liked the idea of seeing lots of little jobs done in the preparation of one big product.

So I got some more wool from the market (blue, red and a knocked back green) and got out my grandmother’s 6.5mm needles. The tricky bit was working out how many stitches made a 10cm square. The sleeve on the wool said 14 stitches by 15 rows using needles of that size, but that turned out to be hopelessly optimistic, and I’m actually doing 14 stitches by 25. At that size, it takes me 25 minutes to knit a square if I’m also watching TV.

The trouble is, when we’re watching something exciting I seem to knit a bit tighter, as you can see when you compare these blue and red squares. The wool is the same weight and make, but the red square is most definitely smaller. That could make stitching them all together a little bit tricky.

Two squares of wool, but the red one is smaller

So far, then, I have 12 blue squares from a full ball and eight red from two thirds of another ball. With two balls of each colour that means I should end up with 72 squares, which will make a nice large blanket for sitting under on colder winter evenings.

Piles of knitted wool squares

I’ve finished my scarf

Nik — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 08:01:14 +0000

I‘m rather proud of myself. I came to the conclusion that the problem with the scarf I was knitting wasn’t only that it was too wide (58 stitches) but also that the wool was too thin.

The wool, like the needles, was from my grandmother, and one set of needles still has the last thing she was knitting left on it: a half-completed cardigan. This wool was what would have been used to finish it off. It looks like it was a summer one, so the wool was obviously fairly light.

Anyhow, inspired by seeing someone else with a chunky scarf wrapped around their neck the other day I realised that I was working with the wrong kind of thread, and that even when it was finished off it wouldn’t be all that warm. So I headed to the market and bought a nice thick yarn. For the technically-minded (and where knitting is concerned, that’s most definitely not me) a 10cm square would be 13 rows by 9.5 stitches. (Does that mean anything?)

It was much better to work with. Better to hold, better to get from one needle to the other without any dropped stitches, and far quicker to knit. I cut my width down to 18 stitches and was done, two balls of yarn later, after just over three hours in two sittings.

It’s lovely and chunky.

Next job: a rug.

A nice chunky weave

Re-thinking that scarf

Nik — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:28:54 +0000

So, a change of plan on the knitting. All was going well, but slowly, and by the time I’d got 12cm into my scarf I realised that it was actually far too wide to be of any comfortable use. This thing would keep a whale warm and need some serious lengthwise folding to fit under a coat.

So I thought I’d narrow it off. I double-knitted a couple of stitches together at the end of each row until I’d reduced it from 58 stitches wide to just 35. Much, much better. A better size and quicker to knit.

I kidded myself – for a day at least – that when I got to the end I’d flare it out again by the same amount and do another 12cm of the wider design. I knitted it up to 30cm, then looked at it again.

It looks terrible.

Who, really, would wear a scarf that looks like that? Not me, that’s for sure. So tough though the decision was I’ve slipped it off the needles and pulled it all apart, re-wrapping the yarn back onto the ball, and started again.

I’ve cast on 35 stitches and am now speeding away. It’s much better at this width: faster to knit, less cumbersome, more fulfilling and more likely to be comfortable to wear when it’s finished.

Scarf 2.0 is looking good so far.

I’m knitting a scarf

Nik — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 12:33:11 +0000

There’s no way I’m going to finish this before the end of winter, but I’ve been fiddling on with the knitting needles I dug out of the airing cupboard a couple of weeks ago. It took a long time to work out how to cast on, but once I had done – with some help from Stitch ‘n Bitch – the actual knitting bit came back fairly quickly.

Note the use of the word ‘fairly’.

How anyone – and here I’m thinking primarily of mothers and grandmothers – can click away through a night in front of the telly and turn out a jumper in a week, I don’t know. I’ve been at it for 10 days while watching stuff we’ve recorded and so far managed 12 cm. That’s less than half a foot.

And I’m not doing anything fancy, either. No pearling, no weaving in a pattern, no multi-coloured, multi-yarn creations. Just plain old black knitting.

If this is going to be a scarf it needs to be a good five feet long by the time it’s done, and at this rate that won’t be for 125 days (my calculator tells me). Or, in other words, 18 May. I won’t be needing a scarf any time around then.

Just as well this is a practice run, then. And, of course, it’ll keep until next winter.

At this rate it’ll need to.

Make your own mittens

Nik — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:10:15 +0000

At this rate we’ll have a whole winter wardrobe. After running a piece on knitting your own hat (very tempting – it looks quite easy) The Guardian has now done a piece on making your own mittens.

Now that sounds a lot more difficult than a hat, but in actual fact it’s not. It all relies on finding a jumper that’s shrunk in the wash. Or, if you don’t have one, washing a jumper so hot that it’s effectively ruined.

How easy? Well, even the writer – a bit of an expert – admitted that it was the only way she could think of to make her own gloves…

…while I might be able to knock up a simple hat from scratch, writing complex knitting patterns like [gloves] is best left to the experts. Instead, I spent the weekend road-testing a very well-known project: making mittens from an old jumper. I’m happy to report that it’s a doddle.

So, basically, ruin a jumper, cut it up and sew it. That’s it. Nothing more to it.

Only trouble is, I don’t have a shrunken jumper. Neither do I have one that is at least 50% wool. Most of mine are synthetic.

Those points aside, I’ll be bookmarking this one. I’m doing my best to knit a scarf right now. It’s slow going, but they would be a great accompaniment when it’s done.

Knit yourself a winter hat

Nik — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:33:18 +0000

What timing! The Guardian has been bitten by the knitting bug and published this apparently easy guide to knitting yourself a winter hat.

Even to me, without knowing much about the dark art of needles and yarn, it does look rather simple, and easily tailored to heads of any size.

Quite tempted.

Crocheting is surprisingly difficult

Nik — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:30:43 +0000

It’s taken me about an hour to crochet a single chain of 20 stitches. That’s not good, is it? Even for a beginner. Things had better improve.

I looked up the instructions in Stitch ‘n Bitch (review to follow, as I was sure I’d already written about it here, but looking through the archives it seems I haven’t) and a few sites online. I’d been fired up by the discovery of enough yarn and old needles in my grandmother’s knitting bags yesterday to give it a go.

They made it look oh so, oh so easy.

And I’m sure it is, when you can work out what to do with all those spare fingers on your left hand. Some of them have to hold what you’ve already crocheted together, some of them have to pull the wool tight, one of them has to stick up in the air and act as a feeder for the incoming wool, even though it feels so much more natural to curl it around and use it to pinch the incoming yarn.

I naively thought that knocking up a quick scarf by the end of winter would be a doddle, but when I got to the end of my first chain of stitches I realised that I didn’t understand the instructions for turning around and going back on myself to make the next row.

But I will persevere. I think a bobble hat may be too ambitious for a beginner like me, but seriously, how difficult could a scarf be?

A stash of retro knitting needles

Nik — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:07:26 +0000

When she died, I inherited some of my grandmother’s older belongings, including a chest made by her brother for her wedding, her 1947 radio and, relevant to today’s story, her bag of knitting.

She was an avid knitter, and every Christmas would see us decked out with a chunky new jumper or a hat, but I’d forgotten quite how extensive her kit was. Digging it out today so that I could find a fine needle around which to roll some paper, I found a veritable hoard. It was an addict’s needle collection, although this time around the addiction was not to illicit chemicals, but a healthy and benign form of self-sufficiency.

They range from as fine as a cocktail stick to fatter than a fountain pen, and while most are crafted of a uniform grey metal there are wooden, plastic and brightly coloured specimens, which would have been the starting point for much of my childhood wardrobe.

I eventually found a needle of the size I wanted, but the best finds – without question – were the retro tobacco tins used for storing buttons, and the lovely forties-style packaging on some of the smaller needles.

Tobacco tins for button boxes, and retro package designs

The most curious instrument, though, was a small green disc punched through with holes. It looked like a tiny measure for serving up individual portions of spaghetti, but with numbers beside each hole it was obviously a gauge for identifying unmarked needles, of which there were many, or, more likely, converting between needle size numbers and actual millimetre measurements. It would certainly come in handy with this kit as the needles are fairly evenly split between those with a simple gauge number and an actual millimetre-based measurement of their diameter.

Knitting needle gauge

I’ve not put the knitting bag back where I found it. Not yet. There’s plenty of good wool in there alongside the needles. I could quite be tempted to give it a go…