Knitted Collar/Scarf

Another project from my recent Knitting Renaissance came courtesy of a friend who passed on a knitting kit to me. It came from a great new initiative called Supercraft which aims to get people crafting and creating. Such fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun!

Yeah, that's me, having a bit of fun while working on that project...

So, Supercraft. What it is, is essentially a craft-kit subscription. You sign up on their website and they send you a fancy box with all ingredients for some crafting every two months. It contains everything that you need for a number of different projects that they describe in their well-produced and easy-to-follow, accompanying booklet. To the right you see the contents of the kit that I worked with (which came courtesy of a non-knitting friend).

The paperbag contained a couple of buttons, some stitching thread, elastic thread and a stitching needle. Everything that was needed to complete the proposed project.

I opted for a collar/scarf which was extremely easy to knit and took one afternoon to make. What usually puts me off knitting is the annoying sewing-together you have to do at the end. Now that all the tools were at hand, I had no excuse to finish the scarf and therefore it got done.

I sewed a one-off, hand-made glass button as a decoration onto the collar, to give it a bit of bling.










And here it is:

Suffering from overexposure again... sorry.

Knitting Hell

Recently I have been doing a lot of traditional hand-crafts. It all started when I decided I needed a crafts project I could take on my summer holiday. Yep, already an age ago, but there you go. Crocheting or knitting, I didn't really care, as long as it kept my fingers busy on the family holiday in Denmark. I set my mother on the case and she got me a lovely project in the local yarn shop.

Even for beginners, the project I settled on was one of the easiest you could start with. I knitted a triangular scarf. The special thing about it was that you had to knit it with needles with different thickness, in order to get a row of really big stitches and an alternating row of tight stitches. As the scarf will be growing in width as you go along, you best knit on a circular knitting needle.

When I bought my wool in the shop, the assistant actually did a great sales speech and sold me a nifty knitting needle where the ends are not fixed permanently but you can exchange them. So I had a thin needle at one end of the circular knitting needle, and a thick one at the other. The sizes used were 2.5 and 9.

And then it is only knit - purl - knit - purl all along.

You start off with three plain stitches on your thin needle. For the second row you also just knit the three stitches. After that, in every row, you add one loop at the beginning and one at the end. That way your scarf becomes a triangular shape.

Once I finished my scarf, I made three tassles from the remaining wool. I pulled the bits of wool through a loop at each of the three points, then threaded a wooden bead from my daughter's jewellery box on to the wool and secured it with a simple knot.

I really love my scarf and have been wearing it quite a bit this winter.