Set the Table for Breakfast with Knitting

I guess I’ve got food-related knitting on the brain lately! After sharing the pretzel and macaron pillows the other day, here’s another fun food knitting project for you.

Play with your food and then set the table with it, with help from the Breakfast of Champions set from Knit Picks. Designed by Joyce Fassbender, this three-piece set includes a fried egg placemat, a napkin that’s a piece of toast complete with a pat of butter, and an orange slice-inspired cup cozy.

The set is rated as being for intermediate knitters and uses sport weight cotton blend yarn (Knit Picks Shine Sport, to be precise).

I say you get to play with your food on this one because each component of the project uses different skills, so you can learn something new or just use some different techniques you might not need every day.

For example the egg is worked in the round from the center out, requiring even increases at intervals to ensure it stays round. The napkin has a bit of intarsia around the edges (a little hard to see in the photo) that makes the crust of the bread, and it looks like the butter is stitched separately and sewn on. It might be fun to add a bit of jam instead of butter if you’re making a set, so each person in the family can have their own color or what they like best on their toast.

The coffee cup cozy uses a bit of stranded knitting to make the orange slices.

These patterns are just so cute and I think they’d bring just the amount of whimsy you need to get through a tough morning. You can grab the free pattern on Knit Picks’ website, or the pattern is also available as part of their Keeping Home ebook, which includes a bunch of sets of projects for the home.

[Photo: Knit Picks]

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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