The Knitting Fiend

I’ve begun converting the newsboy hat pattern to hand knitting. I modified the code this morning, and I’ll be selecting my yarn, swatching and felting this afternoon. I picked a candidate yarn, which is camel colored. (I can’t be certain I’ll use that particular yarn until after I swatch and see how it felts).

Meanwhile, last night I began an afghan. I’m using yummy, hand died yarn Mom’s friend Jill gave me. It’s variegated and looks terrific in my living room which is in shades of deep green and redish-burgundy. (The yarn color looks more burgundy in my living room and more red on my computer screen. )

I’m knitting this at a fairly loose gauge in panels, increasing in the center and decreasing at the edges. I think the zig-zag stripe effect looks more interesting than uninterrupted horizontal bars. I’ll be sewing the panels together when I finish, which will result in a blanket with a zig-zag hem.

I hope it looks as beautiful as I expect.

Now, believe it or not, after I sew the strips together, I’m planning to felt the afghan. That means I need to knit an enormous blanket so it’s still big after it shrinks. (I hope Jill doesn’t learn of this idea and shriek!)

I wasn’t planning to felt this at first. But, knit a small swatch last night, and thought: “What the heck?”. So, threw the swatch in the wash. It felts slowly, at the end of one cycle it only shrunk a bit, but “fluffed up”. The felted fabric is unbelievably cozy. The colors stay true, but the fuzz makes it look sort of blurred or fuzzy. It’s just beautiful.

I figure this is a terrific use for the beautiful yarn because I keep afghans for years and years. So, once I finish knitting, I’ll have this forever.

The mitten is the right size!

I almost can’t believe it. Last night it was huge!

This one fit with just a little extra space. I figure fabric has less stretch after it felts, so I charted these one size larger than my raspberry ones. Also, felted fabric is more wind-proof, so I thought these might make nice “over mittens”. That’s another reason to make them one size larger.

I plan to wear them over my rapberry ones on very windy days.

After I tried the mitten on, I decided that it would be nicer if the thumb were wider when mittens are felted. So I added a choice to the generator for these mittens. Now, if you pick “felted or lined”, it makes the thumb 2 stitches wider. I’m going to go back and add this option to the other generators.

Today, I’m going to make the second mitten!

You can chart your own hand knit felted purse pattern now. This is the purse I blogged about f o u r times.

Machine knitters with ribbers can use the HK version to make a purse, but it requires you to make some changes to adapt to the KM. (It’s not hard…. But, do you really want to knit garter stitch?) I recommend the MK version, which uses a single bed machine.