Knitting

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Amazing Knit Characters from The Hobbit

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lotr-dragon-knitted


I love to see the amazing things that people come up with to knit. I generally stick to wearables, and have only participated in one yarn bombing, but I love it when people just go all out to celebrate something they love in knits.

Case in point: Denise Salway, a 50-year-old Welsh stitcher who has taken up knitting a hoard of characters from The Hobbit. She says she learned to knit in school and put down her needles for decades until her daughter asked her to knit favors for her wedding.

Once that colossal project was done, she turned to knitting dwarves, Gandalf, Bilbo and Smaug, who is stunning. There’s even a knit Peter Jackson complete with camera.

Even more amazing, she doesn’t work from patterns and has just been designing in her head, though she says she has started writing some patterns down. Somebody needs to get this lady a book deal!

[Photo from Wales News Service Ltd., via the Daily Mirror.]

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Comments

  1. Really glad you like my designs I made of the hobbits. Thanks for posting me on your site, hello everyone

  2. I just found this article ,many thanks for taking the time and say such lovely things to my designs best wishes to you all ????

Have you read?

Embellish Your Knit Dishcloth with Flowers

One great thing to knit when the weather is warm (or honestly any other time) is dishcloths and washcloths. They are fun and easy projects and a great way to play with new skills. Pretty washcloths make cleaning a tiny bit more fun, and they’re great to have on hand as a quick addition to a store-bought gift. 

The Daisy Delight Dishcloth from Yarnspirations is a fun one for using leftover bits of green in your cotton yarn stash. What looks like the bottom in the picture is actually the left side as you knit it, and each little color section is worked with its own ball of yarn, intarsia style. 

That’s a little fiddly for a washcloth, but the effect is cute, and it’s a simple way to learn the basics of intarsia knitting (as well as reading a chart) if you don’t already have those skills. 

One the knitting is done, you add the flowers with a bit of lazy daisy embroidery, which is really easy to do even if you’re not that into embroidery. You could also potentially add flowers in duplicate stitch if you’d rather. 

This may be the most work you’ve put into a dishcloth, but isn’t it adorable? It would be fun to use as a hand towel through the spring and summer, and if you already have some leftover green yarn from other projects it should be pretty easy to do. 

You could also take this same concept and make it different colors. All dark green stems with stars on top might be reminiscent of Christmas trees, or brown with daisy stitch on top in different colors could be trees in the fall. 

However you stitch it, this looks like a fun little project for knitters who are comfortable with intarsia and reading charts or who are ready to try those skills. 

You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations. 

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

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