Stitch up Some Medals for Olympics Pretend Play

If you have little kids you know how much they love to pretend, and if they’re watching the Olympics they probably want to pretend they’re winning medals, too.

You can stitch up some easy medals for them to play with and wear in no time flat while you’re watching the Games, and they are sure to keep playing with them long after the flame has been extinguished for another couple of years.

I found two patterns for knit medals, including the Olympic Gold Medal Ribbon designed by Studio Knits SF (check her blog for a video tutorial of the pattern). Hers uses red, white and blue for the ribbon bit, which you could change to your nation’s colors if you like or knit in lime green, which seems to be the color they are using in Rio.

Another option is the pattern from the Homemade Mama, which uses an interesting but simple technique to knit a circular shape flat. She shows medals of different colors, and hung hers on ribbon to make the knitting portion a little faster so you can get on to playing.

Would you make these for your kids? I’m rooting around for gold yarn as soon as I finish typing this.

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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