You know how, when you knit, there's always yarn left over? Always? And how you just can't help yourself but you must keep it? 

There are drawers full of yarn at my mother's house. Oh, there are whole skeins with their tags still on, and a bag of baby weight mustard yellow cashmere tidily unraveled from a failed sweater, but mostly there are scraps. A yard here, a ball there, pretty soon you're talking YARN. 

I'm a terrible knitter, but I kind of like the idea of it, and it's something portable to do on the train when I'd rather listen to music than read. I keep thinking I'm going to make a sweater one day, but instead, I make baby hats. Sometimes I make them with a specific baby in mind, and sometimes I mail them off to the local hospital's NICU. 

So what I've been doing is working my way through the scrap yarn in the big workroom at my mother's. I gather up enough bits in complementary colors, cast on 60 stitches, and just start mindlessly knitting. When it looks right, I start decreasing. Bang zoom, a little roll brim hat.  I change color with abandon, I usually tie the ends together (the horror!), and I sometimes mix wool and acrylic and cotton. Often, I'll use a bit or a lot of something whose provenance I know - like the pictured hat: the pale blue cotton was leftover yarn from a hat that I made for my mother. 

There's something completely satisfying about a little hat made from nothing. 

Posted by Magpie

Photo by Niobe

The felting bug bit me hard last Christmas. Then, some months ago, I'd seen a poncho for sale on the website of an Atlanta based craft cooperative, and I said "I can do that". I felted a couple of shetland wool sweaters, cut them out freehand, blanket-stitched the edges, and added some appliques made from scrap felted wool (from last year's projects).

Here's one of the sweaters, showing how it was cut. I also cut the neckhole just along the transition to the collar ribbing, though if it had been a v-neck sweater, that would have been completely unnecessary. The V at the bottom starts just above the ribbing along the lower edge of the sweater, and the indent under the arms is at the point where the sleeve meets the body.

The blue sweater had been a cable-knit, but once it was felted, I decided I liked the inside better - it had a more interesting appearance. The points of the star are plain pearly shirt buttons, and both ponchos are blanket-stitched along the edge with black wool. My daughter got the one with the star, and her cousin got the one with the heart.

Funnily enough, that same Atlanta craft cooperative has just opened a shop in the next town over from us. I went in there before Christmas and found a rack of the ponchos, and felt oh so smug for having made my own.

Posted by Magpie