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A Simple Shawl to Celebrate Colorful Yarn

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touchstone shawlWe all have those wonderful, colorful skeins in our stashes, those yarns that just seem to jump into our baskets at the yarn shop or fiber festival even though we don’t “need” them or particularly have a use for them.

Touchstone by Laura Aylor is a really pretty option for one of those yarns. It’s worked in bands of Garter Stitch and simple eyelets, so there’s no fancy stitch pattern to get lost in all that color.

It’s written for a DK weight yarn but it would be great to use up some special sock yarn as well (either make a smaller shawl or add a set of segments to make it bigger).

As of this writing the pattern is free to celebrate the renaming of Laura’s Ravelry shop, but it may not be free forever, so grab it quick and knit it the next time you need a colorful, easy little project on your needles.

 

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[Photo: Laura Aylor, via Ravelry.]

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Make Your Knitting Machine Scarves Better

I feel like it’s been a while since I’ve shared any patterns for our circular knitting machine users. I know these devices aren’t for everyone but even though I much prefer knitting by hand, it is kind of fun to crank things out on these machines.

One of the most common early projects for a circular knitting machine is a scarf. Which makes sense, because it’s just one long tube and you can make it as long as you like.

One problem that comes from knitting scarves on the circular knitting machine, though, is that it can be hard to know how to finish the ends of the tube so that it looks like a finished scarf and not a tube of knitting.

If you’re not a knitter or crocheter, the most basic way to finish a circular knitting machine scarf is just by cinching up the ends and maybe adding a pompom to each end to cover up any hole that might still be visible at the end.

But if you have a little knitting or crochet skill or are willing to learn, there are a lot of different options for closing up the ends of a scarf. And this would also be true if you hand knit a tube scarf!

I recently wrote a post over at Our Daily Craft that includes five different ways to close up the ends of a tube scarf:

  • the simple cinching method mentioned above
  • sewing the stitches together
  • three needle bind off
  • grafting
  • crochet bind off

Grafting is my favorite because I feel like it gives the cleanest, closest to a seamless look. If you’re a knitter you may already know how to do it but even if you don’t it’s not that hard to learn.

Do you knit tube scarves by hand or machine? I’d love to know how you like to finish them!