Knitting

Patterns, projects and techniques

Lily’s 8 Weeks of Summer Dishcloth Extravaganza

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lily barnLily’s Sugar’n Cream yarn is a classic cotton yarn and one that a lot of people use to knit washcloths, dishcloths and other durable kitchen and home items.

Lily is celebrating summer with eight weeks of free dishcloth patterns for knitters and crocheters with fun themes. This week marks the kickoff of the celebration, with the theme of Fun at the Farm. The knit washcloth is a barn and the crocheted one has the coloring of a cow (the pattern link is to a PDF).

It’s mostly a stockinette rectangle with a triangle worked at the top. The roof and barn doors are worked in chain stitch after the knitting is done.

Lily is also celebrating the summer by giving away the yarn for each week’s project to one of their Facebook fans. The giveaway is open to residents of the United States and Canada only.

[Photo by Lily.]

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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!