Knitting

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Using Household Items for Knitting

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use a dpn to fold and hold a knitting projectWhether you’re traveling this summer or just want to do a bit of knitting on the go without dragging your whole knitting tool arsenal with you, there are some great hacks you can do to use regular household items to aid your knitting.

Amy from Love Knitting has a great list of things you can use instead of other things. Some of these are classics, like using scrap yarn as a stitch marker or a wine bottle cork as a point protector.

But I don’t think I’d have thought to use dental floss as a stitch holder (I usually have some extra yarn around I can use for that purpose) or using a DPN to hold your folded scarf in place so it’s not warming up your lap when it’s hot outside. That’s pretty brilliant right there.

Her suggestions for common household measuring tools are great, too. It’s a good idea to measure things you always have with you like your hand (mine’s about 6.5 inches from wrist to end of the longest finger) that you can use in a pinch. Or always carry a business card (usually around 3.5 by 2 inches) or an index card (3×5) in your bag, which is handy for jotting notes as well as measuring.

Do you use any common household items in your knitting? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo via Love Knitting.]

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Comments

  2. When knitting cable stitches I have had to open up a paper clip and us it as a holder when my cable stitch holder went missing. I have also used large size baby diaper pins to hold a few stitches away from the others for part of a project.

Have you read?

Embellish Your Knit Dishcloth with Flowers

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]

Book Review – Dishcloths for Special Days [Knitting]

Book Review – Holiday Knit Dishcloths