Patterns, projects and techniques
A published author and award winning knitwear designer, Stefanie Japel brings a fun and trendy style to Knit Lab. Using a Lacy Keyhole Scarf as the course project, the course starts off with the basics – casting on, knitting, purling and binding off, but takes it a step further with up-close demonstrations of intermediate techniques like increasing, decreasing, knitted lace, shaping, and finishing.QUICK! Click HERE to sign up!
One great thing to knit when the weather is warm (or honestly any other time) is dishcloths and washcloths. They are fun and easy projects and a great way to play with new skills. Pretty washcloths make cleaning a tiny bit more fun, and they’re great to have on hand as a quick addition to a store-bought gift.
The Daisy Delight Dishcloth from Yarnspirations is a fun one for using leftover bits of green in your cotton yarn stash. What looks like the bottom in the picture is actually the left side as you knit it, and each little color section is worked with its own ball of yarn, intarsia style.
That’s a little fiddly for a washcloth, but the effect is cute, and it’s a simple way to learn the basics of intarsia knitting (as well as reading a chart) if you don’t already have those skills.
One the knitting is done, you add the flowers with a bit of lazy daisy embroidery, which is really easy to do even if you’re not that into embroidery. You could also potentially add flowers in duplicate stitch if you’d rather.
This may be the most work you’ve put into a dishcloth, but isn’t it adorable? It would be fun to use as a hand towel through the spring and summer, and if you already have some leftover green yarn from other projects it should be pretty easy to do.
You could also take this same concept and make it different colors. All dark green stems with stars on top might be reminiscent of Christmas trees, or brown with daisy stitch on top in different colors could be trees in the fall.
However you stitch it, this looks like a fun little project for knitters who are comfortable with intarsia and reading charts or who are ready to try those skills.
You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.
[Photo: Yarnspirations]
hi this might sound like a silly question but i am teaching my granddaughter how to knit but she just cant get it she is LEFT HANDED and wondered if that had any thing to do with it. cheers susan
Susan, don’t give up! My grandmother didn’t teach me to knit when I was a kid because I’m left handed and she feared just that. But I took a class last year and learned how to knit the “normal” way (throwing with my right hand) with no problem. And children learn much easier than adults do. I think it’s just what/however you learn, like how I don’t like Mac/Apple computers because I learned on a PC. ?
Are you trying to teach her throwing? Maybe she’d do better with continental since the yarn is in the left hand? There are DVDs that teach kids how to knit too; maybe one of those would click?
Good luck!