Are You Ready for Some Football Knitting?

I imagine there are lots of knitters who are football fans, or who live with football fans and end up spending a lot of time this time of year watching football.

It either of those is you, designer Michelle Hunter and Skacel have a great project for you. Known as the Scoreboard Knitalong, the project takes all of football season to knit a Stockinette Stitch loop cowl (the official pattern will be released Sept. 3), with each round representing a point scored in a game.

You work it in your team colors, choose one color to represent your team and the other to represent the opponent. Then you work one round for each point (and optional third color breaks up the stripes between games).

The chosen yarn is HiKoo Simplicity, a superwash merino/acrylic/nylon blend that comes in more than 60 solid colors (some suggestions for professional and a few college team color combinations can be found on the supplies page). It’s worked on size 7 US (4.5 mm) circular needles.

This project sounds like a lot of fun and will give you something to do if you’re going to be watching all the games anyway. Just make sure you have another project at the ready for those low-scoring times.

Does this sound like a project you’d like to do? Are you a football fan or is someone else in your household? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo via Scoreboard KAL.]

Next Pattern:

Knitwear designers can get inspiration from almost anything when it comes to re-creating a color scheme, an image or a texture in stitches. Sometimes the inspiration isn’t always obvious in the finished project, but sometimes it’s more literal.

That’s the way it is with the Tin Ceiling Blanket from Purl Soho. Not just because the inspiration is in the name, but if you’ve ever seen one of these old ceilings you can see that the design of the blanket is quite similar to the pattern of the tin tiles.

This is also a good example of the idea that you don’t have to use fancy stitch patterns or lots of color to make a big impact with your knits. This single-color blanket (designed by Gianna Mueller and inspired by a washcloth and towel set designed by Sandi Rosner) is made completely with knits and purls, other than slipped stitches at the beginning of rows to make neater edges.

The pattern is written out row by row, but there’s also a chart, which means this project is a great opportunity to practice reading a chart where you can check your work against the written pattern if you need to.

It comes in two sizes, a crib blanket and a throw. The yarn used in the sample is an organic cotton sold by the cone, which is a great way to get a large quantity of yarn and have fewer ends to weave in. In fact, you can knit either size of the blanket with just one cone of yarn, which isn’t inexpensive but makes you a great, sturdy, heirloom quality but still washable blanket you’ll use for years to come. (Of course you can use any sport weight yarn you like to make this blanket.)

Check out all the details and grab the free pattern from Purl Soho.

[Photo: Purl Soho]

Next Pattern:

Have you read?