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.]

Over the years I have shared a lot of pumpkin knitting patterns, and I’ve knit and crocheted a lot of pumpkins myself. But it feels like there are always more fun things to try with knit pumpkins, so this year I wanted to look a little more beyond basic stockinette or ribbed pumpkins and share some pumpkin patterns with cables, bobbles and colorwork.

In the cable collection we’ve got these cute little basic cable and ribbed pumpkins from Elly Bear Knits. There are two sizes that make a wide, flat pumpkin and a taller round pumpkin. Both are worked in the round as a tube that’s cinched top and bottom when you’re done, and they use bulky weight yarn.

Another cute cable pumpkin knitting pattern comes from Gray Bear Akswokrat. This one is knit flat and it looks like a chunky yarn but you could use other weights to make pumpkins of different sizes. This one also has an I-cord stem and uses yarn to cinch up the sections of the pumpkin, giving it a more natural look.

Add some bobbles to your pumpkins with this design from Autumn Shelter Makes. Also worked in the round in a tube, it features a repeating pattern of bobbles and uses yarn wrapped around the outside to make segments. This one looks like worsted weight yarn to me.

Of course there’s nothing that says your pumpkin has to be a single color, so let’s throw in some colorwork. I love the look of the Cozy Fall Pumpkin knitting pattern from South Stitch Girls. The little leather loop adds a rustic touch but you could also just add a stick. These pumpkins have five colorwork options and are worked in worsted weight yarn in the round.

There’s also the Autumn Fair Isle Trio pumpkins pattern from Equestriann Style, which has three different sizes of pumpkins with four colorwork designs. They are worked in super bulky yarn in the round and look good with high contrast or more muted color combinations.

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