North America’s Fastest Knitter Has a New Goal

I love this story from the Toronto Sun about the fastest knitter in North America, Lina Benne. The 49-year-old yarn shop owner from Mississauga entered a speed knitting contest on a whim back in 2004 and managed to knit 253 stitches in 3 minutes, deftly beating the American record of 213.

She learned to knit when she was 4 and uses the pivot style of knitting — where one needle is held under the arm, a hallmark of fast knitters the world over. She says she picked up speed through years of muscle memory, and having lots of time on her hands in the early years when her shop wasn’t that busy.

She doesn’t compete for speed much these days — though she says in the video accompanying the story that she’d love someone to come along and blow away her record so she could retire — she does have another goal in sight: starting a Canadian sheep to shawl team to turn fleece into a sweater in record time.

[Photo by Richard Lautens via the Toronto Sun.]

Next Pattern:

As I write this, it’s probably time to start thinking about winter knitting if you haven’t already. And it’s definitely time to think about gift knitting if you have any of that you plan to do for the holidays.

The Dreamy Waves Scarf from Knit Picks, designed by Stacey Winklepleck, would be a great project to go in either category.

It uses two different multicolored yarns and a simple repeating wave pattern to make a project that looks a lot more complicated and dramatic than it is. The gradient look happens naturally just by switching which yarn you’re knitting with.

This pattern uses worsted weight yarn so it’s a pretty quick project even though a scarf is large and this one is pretty wide. It measures 8.5 inches (21.5 cm) wide and 63 inches or 120 cm long. Of course you can make it longer or shorter as you like. As written it takes one ball of each color so it’s a pretty economical project, too.

It’s rated for intermediate knitters but if you know how to do various increases and decreases you’ll be all set. The pattern uses knit 2 together, make 1 left and right, centered double decrease and slip slip knit. All of the stitches are explained in a glossary in the pattern so even if you haven’t done all of them it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.

The pattern also includes tons of options for different colorways in yarn that Knit Picks sells, so you can see how different combinations knit up before you buy the yarn. That’s such a great idea!

Of course if you already have two multicolored yarns with long color runs on hand, you can absolutely use them, too. It might also be fun, but would give you a totally different look, to use a solid color and a bunch of scraps or one multicolored yarn to see how the different colors play together. So many options!

You can grab this free pattern and check out all the color options at Knit Picks.

[Photo: Knit Picks]

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