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Behold the Wonders of Wool

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we love woolNow that it’s almost October (if you can believe it) it’s high time to start thinking about fall and winter knitting and maybe even (gasp) holiday knitting.

It’s a great time of year to be a knitter, isn’t it?

One of the best things about fall and winter knitting is getting to knit with wool, which many of us love quite a lot.

Yarnspirations has a great list of reasons to love work with wool, including ease of blocking and other finishing tasks, warmth, of course, and the fact that hand washing really isn’t all that scary.

My main reason for loving wool is that I am always cold and wool makes me less so.

Why do you love wool? Are you knitting anything with wool right now? (I happen to be working on a giant, super bulky wool roving cabled scarf that I’m sure I’m going to want to live in as soon as its done.)

[Photo via Yarnspirations.]

Comments

  1. I love the squooshieness of wool, and the wonderful subtle ways it takes color. Oh, and it stays warm even when wet. Yeah, and warms up so quickly. Oh, Wool, I love you so!

Have you read?

Easy Knit Baskets to Use All Your Stash

For the past few years I’ve taken part in a Christmas in July blog hop that encourages people to get a jump on their making for holiday gifts. 

I love to use yarn I already have for these projects in the hope that people will consider what they already have that they can use to make projects for themselves or to give as gifts. 

This year it was a couple of knit baskets made using partial balls of yarn left in my stash from other projects. 

They use the same basic pattern but the first one is made with two colors of bulky yarn, and the second used two strands of worsted weight yarn held together, which made the gauge about the same, but I cast on fewer stitches to make a smaller version. 

The bottom of the basket is square, though you can make them rectangular if you’d rather. Then I just knit up the sides in rounds until I was about to run out of yarn. This gave both baskets rather short sides — maybe more like a tray than a basket — but you can keep knitting as long as you like to make the sides of your basket as tall as you want. 

They’re worked in seed stitch, which keeps the edges from curling and adds a nice texture to the baskets.

Of course this also allows you to use even more odd balls from your stash. I’d love to make a big one someday combining lots of different yarn. I mean, I’d probably use it to store more yarn, but that’s a fine thing to do. 

As it is, these little trays are great for sitting on your desk or bedside table to hold little things that always seem to appear there. I like to use one to hold the supplies for whatever project I’m working on, things like little scissors, my tape measure, a crochet hook, etc.

And they would make good gifts on their own or as a container to hold some other goodies if you like. 

You can find the free pattern for these stash busting baskets over at Our Daily Craft.