Knit a Vest That’s Covered in Cats

This might be another one of those posts where all you need to know is in the headline.

Knit vest. Cats? Sign me up.

The Darjeeling Vest by Sangmi Lee offers exactly that.

It’s a stranded knitting pattern worked from the bottom up, with a chart for the sweet little cat faces that are all over the project. It has a round neckline and what the designer calls a “regular fit,” so you can wear it on its own like a tank top or as a vest over a shirt or dress.

The pattern uses DK weight yarn and comes in six sizes. Actual finished measurements of the garment range from 32 to 46 2/5 inches, or 81 to 118 cm. Positive ease of 2 to 3 1/5 inches, or 5 to 8 cm, is suggested, so your body should be that much smaller than the measurement of the size that you choose.

Because I have a black cat (and a tuxedo cat) I of course love that all of the cat faces are black, but you could also change it up so that the cats look more like your favorite cat. Or make most of them black and knit just one of them in, say, bright blue or something, just for whimsy.

No matter the colors you choose, this knit looks like a lot of fun. I peeked at the finished projects on Ravelry and saw that someone also modified it to be a sweater and continued the cat motifs on the sleeves, which is also super cute if you don’t want a vest.

The pattern is available in English and Korean and you can download a copy from Ravelry. And if you’re a dog person feeling left out by all this pro-feline propaganda, be sure to check out her Hundreds of Dogs sweater, also on Ravelry. It’s cute, too, if you like that sort of thing.

[Photo: Sangmi Lee]

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.

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