Knitting

Patterns, projects and techniques

Free Patterns: Speaking of Christmas in July

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hat mitt garland red heartIt turns out I’m not the only one thinking about holiday knitting already. Red Heart has a whole section on Christmas in July patterns on their website, which currently includes 12 free patterns for you to choose from.

These patterns include knit and crochet projects, and there are actually only four for knitting right now, but I’m sure they’ll be adding a lot more as they gear up for their 12 weeks of Christmas (egad!) that starts in October. Right now there are cute ornaments made out of mittens, a stocking with a mitten pocket (perfect for a little candy cane), a garland made of hats and mittens (lots of mittens in this collection, but they are pretty irresistible) and a pretty red party sweater.

Are you thinking about holiday knitting yet? Spill it!

[Photo by Red Heart.]

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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!