Grandmother's Favorite Dishcloth

The other day, I blogged about my first knitting project.  This is another one of those great first knitting projects.  It has only additional skill than the garter stitch scarf, the yarn over.  That makes this an awesome second project for beginning knitters.

It is a great mindless project for knitting while watching TV.  I think that I will knit up some more for my family's grab bag this year for Christmas.  The theme this year is made in the USA.  Obviously anything that I knit is made in America, but I think that I'll use American grown cotton to make it extra appropriate.

Happy knitting!

~Colleen

More Baby Knitting!

A little while ago, I blogged about the bear and monkey baby sets that I made.  I've been knitting up a lot of baby stuff lately for my stash.

These are some objects for my baby shower stash.  They are knit up in baby weight yarn using the pattern for Bev's Baby Set over at Bev's Country Cottage.

I absolutely love the patterns for the booties and mitts, however I don't really care for the shaping of the hat and I've been playing with different ways to do the shaping, although I don't really feel like I've figured it out yet.

If you have any favorite baby patterns let me know in the comments below!

~Colleen

More Hats!

The other day, I blogged about the many hats I made for last Christmas.  I also used another couple of patterns to knit up some winter hats.

This hat was super fun.  I knit up a few in the 1-3 year old size for a some of my friends' babies.  I used this pattern from Bev's Country Cottage to knit them up.  They were knit flat and seamed.  I was really happy with the result.

This hat was knit up with bulky yarn using this pattern that I found on ravelry.  It was super easy, however if I made it again I would have knit it a little longer, because it came out a little short.  I would have done more rows in the ribbing as well.  Otherwise I guess I was happy with the result.

Tell me, what are your favorite hat patterns around the web?

~Colleen

Mittens!

 Yesterday, I blogged about the hats that I gave out for Christmas gifts this year.  I also gave out these fun mittens to match those hats (although I made far fewer of them). The pattern does not change for each size.  Instead, you have to change the size of the needles, which does make the adult sizes a little less warm.  You could of course just take the child size pattern and multiply it to make the size that you want for a warmer mitten.

You can knit them flat and knit them both at once on the same needles.  All you have to do is knit one pulling from the center of the yarn skein and knit the other pulling from the outside of the skin.  This is especially helpful when you are doing stripes, because you do not have to count as precisely (check out the photo below to see an example).

I had so much fun knitting these up.  I used this pattern from the yarn lover's room. 

Enjoy! Have fun.

~Colleen

Hat Happy

This project was so much fun!  This last Christmas I knit about 25 hats for virtually everyone I know.  I was kind of obsessed with knitting these hats. 

I used the easy fit ribbed hat pattern found on the red heart website.  I used all kinds of worsted weight yarns from my stash.  I even knit up a couple in stripes (which is a really great way to use up small amounts of yarn).

I had an absolute blast knitting these up.  It was much more fun that the scarves that I gave out the year before.  What is your favorite gift pattern?  Let me know in the comments!

~Colleen

Heartwarming Knit Scarf

I made this (mostly) following the heartwarming knit scarf pattern found on the red heart yarn website as a gift for my niece.  All I did was cast on fewer stitches (I don't remember how many, sorry) and decrease the number of times the pattern repeated.  Then I knit it shorter than the pattern recommends.  I chose pink because she is obsessed with the color pink and all things girly.

It was a really fun easy knit that I would definitely recommend. It was definately more fun than the first scarf that I knit.

~Colleen

Looking Back at My First Knitting Project

My first ever knitting project was a scarf (shocking, I know).  I made a simple garter stitch scarf.  There is a reason, of course, why this is the first project that every knitter tries their hand at.  The only skills that one needs to know in order to make it are:

• cast on
• garter stitch/the knit stitch
• bind off

Seriously it is the best project to start with to familiarize yourself with the very basics of knitting.  To make it a little more challenging you could add stripes to it to practice changing yarns.  One mistake I made as a beginner knitter, was making several of these scarves as gifts for everyone I knew.  This makes a great first project, however one is enough.  After you have made one of these it's time to try something different to add to your skill set.

I'm curious what everyone else starts with as their first project.  If your reading this I would love to hear about your first knitting projects in the comments!

~Colleen