Yes You Can Knit at the Beach

Labor Day may mark the unofficial end of summer, but there’s probably still lots of warm weather to be had, and our southern hemisphere friends are looking forward to summer as I type. So there are probably a lot of people reading this with trips to the beach in their future who might be wondering if they can take their knitting with them.

The answer: of course! Lucinda from Sew Wrong offers a few tips on her blog, and they’re all good advice.

I would say the most important thing is to take a project that is washable. You will get sand in your stitches, so you need to be able to get it out again, especially if you’re knitting something you plan to use anywhere that’s not the beach. Something easy you don’t have to pay too much attention to is a great idea, too!

Have you ever knit at the beach? Spill it!

[Photo by Sew Wrong.]

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.

Comments

Have you read?