Monday, March 12, 2012

Leftovers, Anyone? More with Sticks and String

Recently I've been obsessed with knitting these lovely round lacy dishcloths - I've lost count of how many!
The pattern is at http://www.knittingknonsense.com/lacyround.html. (Note that the pattern recommends knitting an extra row at the very end. I've tried it both ways and prefer it without that extra row.) Joe thinks they're too pretty to use for dishes and make very nice doilies instead. I've given a few of the plainer ones that I knitted before stumbling on to this addictive pattern to my mom, who feels the same way and uses them under hot dishes on the table. As long as they like them, it's fine with me.
     Each cloth uses up most of a ball of yarn, especially these variegated and striped yarns which have less yardage to begin with, but there are always leftovers, and I've used them to make little coasters like the one in this picture.
The pattern is at http://www.groupepp.com/dishbout/kpatterns/garterstcoaster.html. Of course there wasn't quite enough yarn to complete the coaster, so I finished it with some more or less coordinating yarn, and I'm happy enough with it. But then decided I needed another kind of project to use up those odd bits of yarn, and here's what I came up with - ta da! scrunchies!
They're about as simple as it gets. These are done with worsted weight 100% cotton yarn and an H hook. Using one of the stronger coated ponytail elastics as a base ring, single or double crochet all the way around, as many stitches as you can get onto the ring. Join to the top of the first stitch with a slip stitch and then start the outer ring: *ch 6, skip 1 st, sl st into the next st. Repeat from * all the way around, join with a sl st and end, or, if you have enough yarn, crochet another round of ch 3, sl st into next ch 6 space. I hope this is understandable; I'm not a professional pattern writer and I pretty much made them up as I went along. This is how one of them looks "in action."
Late last summer I cut off my long hair, and then after a while realized I needed a professional to trim up my less-than-satisfactory results so it could look more presentable while it was growing out again. It's so nice to be able to justify using these little goodies - I am just not a short-hair person, no matter how much I like those styles on other people. The song is right: "I gotta be me." And part of being me, I guess, is finding ways to use up little bits of this and that - like leftover yarn - rather than throwing them out.

1 comment:

  1. I like those dishcloths..... I'll take some off your hands ;-)

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