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Knit a Simple Basketweave Pillow to Cozy Up Your Home

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knit basketweave pillowI love having knitting all over the place, and that includes knit pillows. This basketweave pillow from Kat at Just Crafty Enough is really lovely, and not at all difficult to knit.

The back side is all Stockinette (though you could also work it all in basketweave if you wanted to), which makes the knitting go a little bit faster because there’s no pattern to follow for half of it. It’s also worked in the round, so if you do a kitchener stitch bind off you only have to sew the cast on edges together, so there’s almost no finishing. Nothing better than that!

Do you have any knit pillows? Did you make them yourself or buy them?

[Photo via Just Crafty Enough.]

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Knit a Hat with a Flock of Chickens

It’s well known (among knitters, anyway) that knitters seem to love chickens as a motif and a subject of our knitting projects. The Emotional Support Chicken and all the other chicken knitting patterns are just the beginning of our devotion to farmyard friends. 

For example, there’s Farmer Dennis’ Chicken Hat. This free pattern from Stacy Black is a simple worsted weight beanie sized for adults and decorate with a couple of little rounds of colorwork fences and a flock of chickens strutting around the body of the hat. 

You don’t need a lot of any of the colors for the chickens, their facial features or the fences, so this is a great project for using little leftover bits from other projects. The main color for the body of the hat is less than a skein using the yarn suggested, so you might just have everything you need in your house to start stitching up this hat right away. 

The colorwork is presented as a chart, with a 16 stitch section that repeats around the body of the hat. All the color changes are shown on the chart but I think it would be easier to knit the whole chicken in the chicken color and add the eye, beak and other features using duplicate stitch when the knitting is done. That way you don’t have to carry those yarns around the whole hat for just a few stitches. 

As the name suggests, the original hat was given to a farmer who shared their eggs, but anyone who raises chickens or just has a thing for the fowl is sure to love this cute hat. It wouldn’t be too difficult for someone new to stranded knitting or reading charts to make, either, so if that’s you, give it a try. 

The pattern is available for free on Ravelry. 

[Photo: Stacy Black]

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