Pattern: Yvonne’s Double Flower Cloth.
Yarn: Lily Sugar’n Cream, Light Blue
Time: Maybe 6 hours?
Needles: size 6 bamboo DPNs for first 20 rows, then size 6 circulars for last 15 rows

Comments:
This came out really well, I think. The photo didn’t come out so great — it’s not as uneven as it looks. It’s eleven inches across. Except for the very first row, it was really pretty simple to make; the pattern looks like a lot to keep in mind, but once you realize how it’s progressing, you barely have to refer back to the instructions at all.

It was a fun project.  The only thing I would change is to take the suggestion mentioned here to make the starting point a bit less holey.  I sort of thought it was supposed to be holey, but hers looks a lot better than mine!

I really love knitting on DPNs. It’s a little bit harder at the beginning, but once it gets around a few rows, I almost think I like it better than knitting with circulars.

This is the beginning of Yvonne’s Double Flower Cloth, which is going to be part of a multi-piece Christmas present of hand-knit dishcloths and a matching towel topper. I’ve finished two dishcloths — square and of my own desigining — and the towel topper thus far. I’m really thrilled with how the towel topper turned out, but I’m going to block the lace before I post it.

The above photo was taken using the supermacro function on my camera: the whole width of the knitted piece is a little more than a single inch.

My step-grandmother is one of the very few other knitters in my family, and so when it came time to make her Christmas present, what more perfect way could there be to top it off than a miniature knitting pin?

Pattern

1. Make your yarn. I took a length of Sugar’n Cream varigated cotton yarn, Summer Splash color, and unraveled it, then used a single ply for my “yarn.” I liked the result; the varigation turned into a self-striping at such a tiny gauge. Tip for unravelling yarn: put a weight at the end, and allow it to spin out while you pull the plys apart.
2. Cast on 14 stitches. Or however many you like, really. I used the tiniest sock needles I had, which were size 000 (1.5mm).
3. Knit to desired length. I had vague ideas of doing a pattern, or cables, or something, but it’s so tiny! So I just did garter stitch. It still took forever! I knit about twenty rows.
4. Make miniature knitting needles. This is the hardest part. You can use toothpicks, cut to size with regular scissors, and glue a bead on the end. Mine were made by snipping apart a real sock-sized knitting needle into approximately thirds, and taking the two pointed pieces resulting to use as the needle, and gluing a tiny rivet on the end for the cap. I don’t think scissors would have cut the needle, and the miniature rivets are extremely difficult to find, so the toothpick option is probably much easier.
5. Make a miniature ball of yarn. Take another single-ply piece of unravelled yarn, tie it to your existing tail, and wind it into a tiny center-pull ball, locating the knot in the center. This hides your yarn “tail” and also ensures that the ball won’t unwind, even if it comes unglued from the pin.
6. Glue the pieces together. I used Aleene’s Original Tacky Glue, which worked very well. The ball is glued on, as is the cap end of the non-knitting needle. The needle is pushed through the first stitch on the needle with all the stitches so that it can’t unravel easily — I didn’t want to glue the stitches themselves on themselves, because I think it would have detracted from the miniature realism. Lastly, I glued a small fastener-pin (as available widely at craft stores) on the back of the pin just below the needle, to farther attach the stitches.

The promise of endless, effortless i-cord. One low price. A single problem: some reviews would seem to indicate that either a)it doesn’t work, or b)it breaks!

So what to do?

Section One. How not to break your Embellish-Knit.

1. Cardinal rule: if it gets “stuck,” by which I mean if it starts to catch, bind, or otherwise become difficult to turn, don’t force it.
2. Make sure there is absolutely no tension at all on the yarn as it feeds into the tube. Pull the yarn out of the skein or unwind it off the ball before you try to knit it through, and don’t even hold the incoming yarn in your hand as a guide.
3. Ensure that the weight is free-floating. When your cord grows long, and the weight hits the floor or your lap, it’s time to move the weight up!
4. Allow the i-cord to untwist. It seems to work best if you allow the entire length of the i-cord to hang freely along with the weight, but if that is impossible, make sure to manually untwist it periodically.

Section Two. How to use your Embellish-Knit.

1. Use the right weight of yarn. I couldn’t get regular Sugar’n Creme yarn to work, but Lion Magic Stripes and Red Heart Sport did, to give you an idea. If your yarn is too thick, yarn lumps seem to be the inevitable result.
2. Check that the little “gates” are open before you try threading the yarn in. All the way open.
3. I find that it works best to apply tension on the bottom (tail) yarn while threading the hooks specified in the instructions and then attach the weight. It’s tempting to wait until the machine “gets started” to put the weight on, but that doesn’t seem to work.
4. Especially if you’re using a heavier yarn, watch the yarn closely during the first few rounds. When the gate closes, the yarn outside the gate should slide up and over the gate and off the hook. Sometimes it gets stuck in the early rounds, presumably because the full torque isn’t yet being applied to the stitches, and has to be helped along a bit. Once you get an idea of how the machine is supposed to work, this will be pretty clear; otherwise try a lighter-weight yarn to start.
5. If you’re doing it correctly, there may be a moment when it seems like the yarn is sliding off the hooks prematurely. I ripped mine out a number of times because I thought it was malfunctioning, but every time that I just let it go and kept cranking, it turned out all right after all.
6. It seems to snag the yarn less if you open the weight clip as far as it will go, and then slide it all the way onto the i-cord, so that it’s biting all the way across. Otherwise it can pull the cord out of whack, or even pick it.
7. I’ve cranked mine as fast as I can, with no ill effects. Many reviews say you have to watch it every round — I haven’t found that to be the case in the least.

I love my Embellish-Knit.

Hi. I haven’t updated in months. I was diagnosed with breast cancer, which sort of killed the knitting bug for a while, but now I’m back to knitting like crazy, and I plan to keep the blog updated. I’m sorry I haven’t kept up.

I think my yarn obsession dates to when I was about four, when my great-grandmother very graciously and patiently took the time to teach me how to crochet. She gave me a little ball of yarn that was leftover from some project of hers, loaned me a needle, and I promptly went to work. Before our visit was over, I’d been driven to the nearby Walmart (this was before there were Walmarts where we lived, so Walmart was a treat all to itself) where I got my own size G needle, and my grandfather bought me a skein of varigated yarn that was purple-and-pink-and-other-pastel colors that I thought was the most beautiful thing on the planet. I only learned how to crochet single-chain that visit, but I’d seen her slide the needle back through the chain to add another row, and after a little bit of trial-and-error, I figured out how to make little rectangles and circles once I was home.

Crocheting, sadly, didn’t exactly stick, although strangely I’ve never forgotten those basic stitches. But crocheting takes so long, and I quickly turned my yarn energies toward those plastic-square sheets, from which I made many tacky bookmarks, and then friendship bracelets once I was in junior high. At last, I figured out that yarn wasn’t really very cool, and so my sizable yarn stash was abandoned for so long that my mother finally threw it out.

But as Christmas 2005 approached, Seth and I found ourselves with more medical bills than we’d quite been prepared to pay and so I started brainstorming ideas for inexpensive Christmas gifts. Yarn was cheap, I recalled, and as far as I knew, my entire yarn collection was still safely ensconced at my parents’ house, anyway, and it should be a simple matter of dropping it in the mail–ere long, I’d be churning out scarves and hats and mittens for my whole family! Time is only money if you have money; otherwise, time is worth a lot less. So I was decided. The only problem was that I had no earthly idea how to knit!

I convinced Seth of the “wisdom” of my plan, however, and we were off to the craft store to buy a set of needles. I knew enough from crocheting to know that certain size needles went with certain sizes of yarn, so I picked up two skeins of yarn and appropriate needles at the same time. I wondered what the circular needles were for, but was pretty sure that I needed the straight ones first. Then we went home, and I sat at my desk and studied the Knitting Help website until I got the hang of the basic knit stitch. Then I started knitting like a fanatic. I even tried knitting in the dark once, which didn’t work so well (I was also half-asleep and in the middle of a longish car trip), but it evidenced my determination. I was drinking it up, amazed at all the things it was possible to do with some string and two sticks: cables, lace, colorwork, etc. Not that I knew how to do any of that, but the possibilities were astounding. I had caught the knitting bug, and before Christmas had arrived, I’d accumulated a little stash of knitting books, yarn, and my handy-dandy set of Denise interchangable needles.

I kept on knitting like a maniac until March. That was when we found out about Surgery Number One, and I was distracted by that and also by work, and then of course April brought the surgery itself, which made it impossible for me to knit for a while, and then May dawned with the cancer diagnosis. And that sucked the knitting bug right out of me. I had just started two Big Projects–multi-month-long-projects–and it occured to me that it was arrogant for me to have assumed that I’d be around to finish them. So instead I rather morbidly assumed that I wouldn’t be around to finish them, and so I pulled them off the needles, folded them up, and they’re still sitting unfinished in the bottom of my knitting bag. During radiation I thought about knitting, and I actually tried a few times, but I just didn’t have enough energy.

I made sure my knitting things got left out of storage when we came to Delaware, however, and in September I dug my needles back out and started knitting again. Big projects still frighten me, but I’m steadily becoming more optimistic, and I haven’t frogged either WIP yet. In fact, I have a vague notion of digging one of them out and knitting like crazy to finish it by Christmas.

Anyway, all this background information, and what I really wanted to talk about is why I adore knitting. Probably a big part of it is that I’m famously bad at loving repititious things. (I’ve been known to count ceiling and floor tiles, for instance, and Seth has noticed that I have a real problem with obsessively pushing buttons over and over and over and…) So doing the same thing over and over again hundreds or thousands of times to make one tiny finished object doesn’t faze me. But the really cool thing about knitting is engineering. There’s a reason why knitting is traditionally a male-dominated activity! When you knit, you learn about how the different techniques result in different slants of the yarn in relation to the needle, and then when you join different types of stitches into those differing slants, you get different results. When you knit rows, you’re “supposed” to turn the work and do a different stitch (purl) on the wrong side of the fabric–but how cool is it to learn the way the yarn and the needles work together to simply knit in reverse, instead, never turning the work and never purling? (I find purling hurts my wrists, which may be because I’m not holding the needles properly.) There are so many different ways to pull the yarn through the stitch to form a new knit stitch, and at first they seem identical, but eventually you start to see little predictable variations in the results, and you learn how different stitches work together to create the best final result.

Then there’s the whole design element: in addition to the obvious design choices like shaping and what color yarn you’re going to use, you get to choose which stitch pattern you like, what kind of cast-on looks best with your article, what kind of bind-off to use, what kind of ribbing, and whether you prefer cables or lace. And then at the really micro-level, there are subtle variations on stitches that make them stretch different ways or have a more pearlescent look. It’s so much fun. And it’s awesome when you’re finished a project, to look at it, and for better or worse, to know that it’s unique in the whole world.

And lastly, even though it isn’t crocheting, I can’t help but think occasionally of Great Gran–and Great Mammaw, whom I don’t remember but whose quilts have always been near at hand–and I feel like I’m continuing in an excellent tradition set out by my great-grandmothers. I remember lying in bed as a child, buried underneath one of Great Mammaw’s quilts; the quilt is very simple flannel patches sewn from leftover bits of clothing, and it was frayed and coming apart long before it fell to me, but I’d sit there and trace the squares with my finger and wonder if that square was from one of Great Pep-paw’s shirts, and if that square was from one of my great-aunts’ dresses. Mom tried to throw it away some years ago (in her defense, it is falling completely apart) and I rescued it from the garbage can. I wanted to show it to my children, and say, here’s the quilt your great-great-grandmother made and I slept under, and here’s another quilt she made that’s never been used even though she died decades ago, and here’s a doll afghan your other great-great-grandmother made, and here’s a doily your great-grandmother made, a quilt your other great-grandmother made, and a quilt your grandmother quilted, and an afghan she crocheted; and here’s a throw your mother made, and here’s some yarn and needles and fabric, go make a blanket of your own.

Updates are coming as soon as I can get my camera to turn on!  I’ve been working on a second scrunchie, which was attempting to be more full and “normal” than the first (with less success than I would have liked), and my two new “smaller” projects (vs. The Epic) are a m:robe case for my husband out of cotton chenille and a birthday present (or two…) for Certain Other People. 

Pictures and updates to come once my camera works… I’m a bit at my wits end about it.

Recipient & Occasion
This was an experiment.  And I don’t know anyone, besides myself, who wears scrunchies.  So: me!

Yarn
Lion Homespun, Fuchsia, knit on size 11 needles.  I’m starting to use this yarn a very scary great deal.  Can’t beat the non-acrylic look at acrylic prices!

Washing Instructions
I think this might actually be safely washable.

Pattern
Garter stitch; the only memorable thing is that I did elongated stitches (three loops) in the middle, which wound up around the elastic, and helped reduce bulk very nicely.  I would do that again.  It’s basically a rectangle, which is then sewn around the elastic.

Comments
This knitted up in two hours or so.  I originally wanted to make it fuller, but I’m glad I didn’t — it’s very pretty and feminine as-is.  That said, a lighter yarn would definitely need more fullness to make it have any bulk.  Also: I used a regular (skinny) hair elastic, e.g. from Walmart, on the inside.  I have a little collection of them, and I never use them, so I decided that they need scrunchie-coverings.  This is episode one. 

I’m still embroiled in my Secret Project (see a couple of posts back), so I unfortunately can’t say too much about it!  Suffice it to say that I’m a bit behind schedule due to some non-knitting interference, but it’s coming along beautifully!  And not too slowly — it’s just a big project. 

I need to figure out a way to write about Secret Projects without clueing in the recipients, especially since the recipient is my mother!

Recipient & Occasion
Ooh, that’s a secret still.  

Yarn
Crystal Palace “Party,” Chocolate Almonds color.  And sadly, I don’t remember what size needles I used!  It took barely two balls.  The gold flowers were knit from another type of yarn, but despite placing the wrapper in a very specific location… it has disappeared.  Ah, well.

Pattern
This I made up.  It’s just a little rectangle, with alternating stockinette stitch & garter stitch, with a cream felt lining and little gold flowers decorating the bamboo handles.  I wasn’t making it for me (i.e., the colors weren’t ones I would have picked for myself), but it has turned out very cute!  The little flowers really added a lot to it.

Comments
It’s terribly difficult to photograph!  And I wasn’t very accomplished at the actual sewing bits on the lining… I had to rip out four sets of stitches and I’m still not terribly happy with it!  Definitely an area in which a sewing machine would have come in handy!  Or else I just need to learn the art of working with a needle and thread…  ha.