Knit Meter

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

OR: How Happy Can One Girl Be Over A Bag?

There are so many knitting and crochet books available these days which is a huge change in the last 10 to 15 years. I frequently have a quick perusal of the books in the library as I nearly always find a book new to me. One of these books was Not Your Mama's Crochet which was edited by (at that time) a local designer. One of the designs was a bag made from what I call carrier bags, the plastic part of the now redundant question "paper or plastic?"

I duly saved the required number of bags but didn't do anything with them. Mainly because I didn't want to go to the work of cutting them up and crocheting them to end up with something embarrassingly awful. But in the interests of using up my stash (used bags count as stash?) and because I didn't crochet at all in 2009, I decided to go ahead with the project.

Basically there were three parts:- cutting the bags into strips, joining the strips and crocheting the bag.

So let the excitement begin.
Here we have the bags waiting to be cut up. In the interests of full disclosure they are from the Co-op but they are not the current design. These ones have green and some black print. I used my rotary cutter and three was the best number to cut together. They were very staticy (is that a word?) and clung together.



Here are the bags now cut into strips.




I was full of grand ideas and I was going to join the strips into one big ball before starting to crochet but that soon got boring. I'm not sure how many I joined before I started, but once started I joined strips in as needed. I put all the strips into a bag and just took them out as they came, I didn't plan the order of the pattern. At one point, I joined a new strip at the beginning of the round so I counted how many strips were needed for a round, I then put three times that number to one side for the handle round and the rounds after. Except as you know the best laid plans.....when I ran out of strips instead of unpicking my work back to the beginning of the round, I took some strips from my saved pile to finish the round, thinking it wouldn't matter as I had over estimated. No such luck! I needed a few more strips to finish the last round and the bags I had used were old so what was I going to use, but in the bottom of the bag where I keep carrier bags I found some old design Co-op bags to save the day.

So here it is in all its glory.




The finished size is approx. 25 cm width and 19 cm depth and I used just over 18 bags. The handles were purchased at a fabric store.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Last of the Dishcloths

When I had finished December's dishcloths I started on the ones I had missed during the year. There were three. One I had unpicked and not restarted and the other two had been "clued" when I was away.

This was the one I had started and given up, I think because it was too big. So this time I cast on less stitches to work 2 pattern repeats instead of 3 and worked slightly fewer rows. the pattern was originally for a washcloth and I think it would work well for that; not that I have ever made a washcloth. (Face flannel for the UK readers.)




Don't you love this one? It's not very big and works fine for washing-up but not cleaning but who cares when it is cute. Added bonus it takes very little yarn.



This is the last one. it is hard to see what it says when you see it in the flesh so I don't know how well you will be able to see in this photograph. It says Thank You and the other part is supposed to be a rose.




I have decided not to make the dishcloths from the Yahoo Group this year. After all how many cloths does one house need? But I doubt it will be the end for knitting dishcloths. I still have some balls of yarn untouched as well as a load of left overs. Despite having made this decision, I had to stop myself from buying dishcloth cotton in Zellers just because it was on sale.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Photo Round Up

I caught up with posting photos of my projects made in 2009 and just have to post photos of projects finished near the end of the year.

Firstly here are a couple of pictures of the baby blanket I made for a colleague. The first is the finished blanket and the second is a close up when it was in progress so that you can see the pattern and yarn more easily.




And here are a couple of scarves. The first one I called Really-Using-Up-The-Stash as I had used yarn left over from a larger project to make gloves and then the yarn left over from the gloves was used to make the scarf.



This scarf was made with the same yarn as these gloves but I added in some multi-coloured thread to give some colour to the yarn.


Friday, January 1, 2010

Resolution Time Again

This year I have decided to make some resolutions. I am going to read all the books and knit all the patterns on my lists. To achieve this I am going to give up work and sleeping.

OK so that's not going to happen; although it would be nice to be able to knit and read whenever the mood took me but in reality this has never happened. The periods of my life where I have not worked, I have felt guilty whenever I took a break during the day and I find that I actually read and knit more now that I am working.

Looking back at what I have written in previous years I have to laugh at what I wrote last year about it getting boring knitting scarves. How come I still managed to knit 5 in 2009?

My aim for this year is to use the yarn I bought in 2009. Not sure how this will work in practise as I purchased quite a few balls of sock yarn in the sales and as I like to knit patterned socks they are not a quick knit any longer. I will continue to use the odds and ends of stash yarn that have been around for a while.

And I'll continue to read and look after the house and love my family. (And hibernate in the winter.)