Knitting Projects

I'm a self-taught knitter who started knitting 15 years ago. My favorite knitting project is typically a sweater. They tend to take me a little over a year to complete, so I've only made 5 sweaters since I started. Most of my yarn time has been taken up crocheting the afghan that I previously blogged about.

Now that I think about it technically I've knitted 6 sweaters, but that one I was more a failed experiment in customizing fit than a sweater. The plan is to frog the sweater and start over.

Now that the afghan that I had been working on for so long is complete, I can go back to knit other things that I'd been putting off. During the course of my intense knitting period before I took on the task of crocheting an afghan, I had accumulated a fairly sizeable yarn stash. I really didn't want to become a person who had a bunch of yarn, but never did anything with it, 'cause that's just not healthy in my opinion!

While still working on the afghan at times I took time away from it to knit up sweaters that I had purchased yarn for before buying the yarn for the afghan. Once I finished these sweaters, I decided that I wouldn't buy any more yarn until the afghan was finished. I was somewhat successful with this plan. Other people occasionally gave me yarn as a gift, which was nice, but most knitters will agree that the yarn that you receive as a gift isn't of too high a quality. One Christmas, I did get a local craft store's gift card from my husband. At that time, that particular craft store sold what I thought was pretty decent quality yarn for that type of big box store. I bought some wonderful black cashmere/wool blend yarn with it that I planned to knit into a pair of gloves when the afghan was done.

I finally finished the afghan this fall and soon after began knitting on my gloves. The gloves took me about a month to make and I hadn't ever made anything like that before, so it was a big change for me. Normally, I'm knitting a sweater that has some sort of pattern to it like cables or something, so I constantly have to keep track of where I am in the pattern. The result is a wonderful looking garment, but the knitting experience is one that requires my full attention.

Knitting the gloves required attention, but it seemed pretty minimal. It was a great experience creating something so useful as gloves. While knitting them, I thought about what to make next. My husband had brought up the idea of knitting a cover for my stand mixer; even though, that already has a store bought cover. The idea came to me to make covers for the other small appliances that we have. I considered making covers for our toaster and bread machine, but then I thought of something else that we needed more.

Years ago my husband and I had bought a towel type of bathmat. It was great when it was new, but had slowly deteriorated into a rag. At last, it was relegated to our ragbag. Neither of us wanted to spend the money on getting another bathmat, so we've been using a towel as an ersatz bathmat.
After finishing the gloves, I began knitting a bathmat. I found a pattern for an entrelac dishcloth done in a garter stitch on Ravelry. Someone had modified the pattern and made a bathmat out of it. I had wanted to use the yarn that I had left over from the afghan in another project such as granny square afghan, but decided that I wanted a break from afghans. I felt that knitting the bathmat from yarn left over from the afghan was a good compromise and set my mind on that.

My bathroom has pink and black tiles in it. I had a what I felt was a decent amount of cotton pink yarn left over from the previous project and I had pretty much a full skein of acrylic black yarn. I thought about making the bathmat with black triangles around the outside and pink squares in the middle.

I wasn't sure if I had enough pink yarn, so I measured it and decided to alternate black squares on every other row. The modified pattern on Ravelry has the bathmat size as 16.5" x 30". 16.5" seemed too narrow for me, so I measured our ersatz bathmat and came up with 25" x 30" as the size for my bathmat. I knitted a swatch to come up with the stitches per inch and how many stitches to cast on.

I had looked around for patterns for small appliance covers, but came up with nothing I liked. What I'll probably do is measure each of the small appliances that I want to make covers for and then knit up swatches in the yarn I choose. I plan to knit the covers with yarn that people gave me as gifts. I think this would be a good use for it, since I probably won't use it for anything else.

However, I still think about trying to recreate an old stocking cap that I used to own. I used to wear it when I was in grade school. I had found it one winter in our family's box of winter clothes. No one claimed it and I guess it must have been given to us by some family friend whose child had out grown it or just didn't want it anymore. I had loved this hat; even though, I got alot of grief from my siblings for wearing it. I was in the 4th grade when I used to wear it and would soon be moving on to the middle school. My siblings kept warning me that I should give up the hat when I started riding the bus with them to attend middle school because it would make me a target of ridicule.

Of course, I refused and their warnings only made me decide to wear the hat for a long, long time. This was not to be and during the winter I lost the hat and never found it again. Our family moved away from that town and I never moved on to that middle school and instead just went to another grade school.

Years later one of my sisters confessed that she and my brother took the stocking hat from my coat pocket while we eating out and they buried it outside beneath the snow. I had always wondered what had happened to the hat and now I knew. Surprisingly, I wasn't mad at them, but I still longed to have another hat just like it. Making this hat might be a good use of the spare yarn that I have.

Gloria Vanderbilt Embroidered, Crocheted Afghan

My current project is an embroidered, crocheted afghan from McCall’s Do-It-Yourself-Guide Gloria Vanderbilt Designs for your Home magazine, Holiday 1975 edition.

I had always wanted to make this afghan.  The unique zigzagged edge fascinated me, so I held onto this magazine for years.  In the aftermath of 9/11, I had heard horrendous stories of the growing prejudice against Muslim and Afghanistan people.  This bothered me.  This feeling grew as I saw French fries being called Freedom Fries and the small French bread loaves that once were sold at my local grocery store as ‘French Twins’ suddenly disappeared.  It made me wonder if those knitted or crocheted blankets called afghans would disappear as well.

I was determined to wage a silent protest against what I viewed as the growing discrimination of the Afghan people by starting work on the afghan that I had long planned to make.  The post 9/11-world was the right time to begin such a project. 

I had recently learned that my favorite local needlework store was going out of business.  Its location in the Alley Shops in the Crystal City Underground in Arlington, VA, which is close to the Pentagon didn’t help it weather the growing fear of Washingtonians of another similar attack occurring so the little shop was doomed.

I purchased most of the yarn at Nimble Needles in 2002 and the necessary Afghan hook that same year from Mary Maxim.  The rest of the yarn needed was bought at Michaels.  

In February 2002, I began crocheting each of the strips.  The afghan is made up of 16 strips that are done in Tunisian crochet.  Each of the squares is 19 ribs high and 20 vertical bars wide. 

As you can see from the above picture, the magazine only shows part of the placement of the 13 flowered motifs.  Thankfully, there is a diagram showing the arrangement of colored squares.  As I worked, I began to think about how to create the same placement of the motifs to match the picture.  I made my own diagram on the computer and realized that I could use what motifs were visible in the picture as a guide and then place the rest in a random pattern.  In the end, I believe that I was successful.

During 2009, I finished crocheting all of the strips.  Next in the afghan’s directions was to edge each of the strips with black yarn. 

I have a confession to make here and it’s somewhat off-topic, I really don’t know much about crocheting.  My maternal grandma taught me the very rudimentary basics of it during a summer visit.  All I really know are making a chain and single crochet.  My grandma crocheted afghans for each of her grandchildren.  I was very interested in learning the craft, but grandma wasn’t interested in teaching me more than what she did.  I never understood why, but it's possible that she didn’t have the patience.  During most of her visits, she was always crocheting something, usually an afghan made up of granny squares.  I can remember sitting and trying to see what exactly she was doing with the yarn so that I could somehow learn how she made them.  I asked her once and all she said was, “I just do the stitch I do”.

I eventually got a magazine and did crochet one granny square.  Later, I learned about such things as double and half double crochet, but honestly know nothing about crocheting afghans.  Also, I haven’t been able to internalize the process like with crocheting chains and single crochet.  So when it came to edging the strips, there was a lot of ripping out the edging and starting again.  The afghans that grandma made had edges that were flat against the edges of the afghan.  Finally, somehow I was able to get the edging the way I felt it should look.  It seemed that when I first began, the edging I was doing was coming out so that it stood up perpendicular to the strip’s edge.

Once the edging was completed, I could begin embroidering each of the 16 strips.  I realized as began that I would have to come up with color combinations for each motif as well.  This color combination according to the picture in the magazine changed with each use.  I saw that I would have to plan out the color combinations of every motif for each row as I worked.

Currently I've finished embroidering the 8^th row, so I’m halfway through with the embroidery.  My goal is to have the afghan finished by the 10^th anniversary of 9/11.  I’m not sure if I’ll reach it, but I’m eager to at least try.  Because it's always better to try something and fail than to have never begun at all.