'Just Start'

I took the advice that God's Kid gave in a comment on my previous post and made a start on my beaded knitting project. The pattern is from Family Album by Kaffe Fassett and Zoe Hunt. I followed the instructions to photostat the graph and then colour in with pencil crayons. The original is intended to show different coloured yarns, but it works for different coloured beads too.

I had a set back when a bead broke when I was doing the following plain row. Drat! Nothing for it but to undo the whole beaded row, cut the thread, add a bead and redo the row. Last week I experimented with making a join in the middle of a row, but it doesn't work. It's not possible to leave it as is either, the space glares out.

My plan is to make an entire pattern, tulips facing both ways, and then show the experts at the next meeting before going any further.

Prepare To Crochet

The brief for the crochet section of competitions for the women's organisation I belong to, is to crochet a top suitable for evening wear. Right. I managed to buy mercerised cotton when we went to Kimberley a few weeks ago. It was a bit of a mission because there were two shelves with a muddle of sizes and colours and I had to sift through them to find 10 balls in the same size and colour.

The next step was to look for a pattern. I found hundreds of crochet tops on Pinterest. Some of them didn't have patterns or charts, some of them were completely unsuitable, but even so, there was plenty of choice. After a lot of dithering, I printed out a couple of patterns and crocheted samples using a 2 mm hook. It seemed to me that the fabric was a bit too loose and loopy, so yesterday I looked for a smaller hook. I couldn't find 1.5 mm, but I did get a 1 mm hook. I worked another sample of the pattern I'm leaning towards, and I do think it looks better:

So now I have the beaded knitting project and the crochet top 'ready to roll', but a certain reluctance to get on with them! The deadline is many months away, but I don't want to leave things to the last minute and if I want to enter other sections too, I had better just dive in.

Done

My do over is done. I was working with rather short lengths of wool by the time I finished, but Jack  now has a second sleeveless pullover to wear, and my spare room has fewer useless garments cluttering it! Now I just need to wash it to take the crinkles out.  Here's the post where I read that washing a garment made from previously knitted wool would smooth is out. It's really about sock blanks, an interesting concept that I haven't come across before.

Pretty Butterfly

This muskaan's pattern. I think the headline is intended to be 'make me pretty, please', but when I look at it I see 'make me, pretty please'. Make it I did, but not as pretty as Ninetta's version. There are a lot of possibilities for decorating this butterfly, but it is pretty in any case.

Pairs

I've made and given away several pairs of pot holders since Easter. These two pairs are hot off the press, ready to be gifted.  I've made them into pairs using colour, but in fact they come from two different sources. The zig zag one is a pattern on Ravelry by Nichole Cupp, who also has a tutorial here, and the squares one is by angelfire, here. The two start off in different ways. The zigzag one overlaps two sets of blocks. The squares one weaves a foundation chain in the second colour through the blocks of the first colour. I wondered if I could use the squares technique for the zigzag. I could, and I think it gives a much neater start:

Do Over

My neighbour Dorie says if you have a knitted garment that is unsatisfactory, unravel it and knit something wearable! Sounds sensible put that way. While I'm sorting out Jack's Winter wardrobe, I thought I might apply Dorie's principle to a sleeveless pullover that hasn't been worn for years because the neck and armholes are too big and saggy. I bought the wool when we were on holiday in New Zealand in 2010.

I had some trouble undoing it, until I remembered that I knitted it downwards, starting at the shoulders and knitting in the round below the armholes, to get as much length as possible with my limited yarn. So I had to start unraveling from the bottom!

Right. I started knitting, using 'mistake rib' - an odd number of stitches, knit 3, then p2, k2 to the end, every row the same. I'm knitting it crinkles and all, after reading recently that washing the work after knitting will smooth it out.

Purse Construction

Our power was off all day yesterday, so I had to put off the assembly of my beaded-knitting purse. Thankfully it came back on about 7 pm, so today I could get on with the job.

I'm going to show how I put the purse together, step by step, as a record, so that I won't have to go through the same thought process when I make a full size bag.

Step 1 was to measure the beaded knitting, length and breadth. I then cut a piece of stiff interfacing to those measurements, and a piece of satin lining 1.5 cm bigger all round

On my first attempt, I ironed the interfacing to attach it to the satin, but that made a horrible, bubbly mess, so I cut another lot and just sewed the edging in with my sewing machine.

The next step was to make the gusset, twice the length of the small edge of the bag, and a few centimetres wide after hemming:

I folded the gussets in half and hand sewed them to the larger piece to form the bag lining:

I then attached the bead work to the outside of the lining, using quilting clips to avoid pin marks on the satin

I had to experiment to find the best way to sew the beaded knitting to the lining. Eventually I decided that back stitch with the knitting selvage showing worked best. I still have to sort a fastening out. I hope to use a magnetic clasp for the clutch bag, but for this purse I'll probably use a press stud. So that's it, I should be able to do that again with a full size bag.