Are You Stitching in the Ravellenic Games This Year?

It’s almost time for the beginning of the Summer Olympics, which means it’s time for another session of the Ravellenic Games (formerly known as the Ravelympics, but that’s a long story).

The Games are a time when knitters, crocheters and other fiber artists challenge themselves to complete a project that is started during the opening ceremonies and cast off (or however you want to define finished) before the torch is extinguished. That gives you a little more than two weeks.

You can join a team, based around anything from geographical location to type of knitting to geeky fandoms and more, or you can compete on your own. This time around there are 15 events, from the Afghan Marathon to WIPs Wrestling. You can also earn laurels for using different techniques such as cables, colorwork, lace, weaving and more.

I have never successfully managed to do a project for the Games, though I would love to. My daughter is home for almost all of the time period this is happening, but maybe that means I would have more time for knitting than I might otherwise.

Are you signed up? I’d love to know what you’re planning to make!

[Photo via Ravelry.]

Next Pattern:

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!

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