Do you have some worsted weight or other yarn you aren’t crazy about, or don’t want to use for projects at that yarn weight? You can convert it to a bulky or super bulky yarn with a bit of elbow grease. Combine colors along the full length or create colorways as you go along, or just make one color, and the yarn will have new characteristics for unique projects.

While fiddling around with yarn I needed some matching cord for a knitted/fulled/felted sporran I was making for my kilt so I took some of the same fishermans yarn by Lion Brand and crocheted up about five feet of chain in this yarn, then went to work felting it in a sink full of hot soapy water, just rubbing it all in a ball and every half minute or so pulling it all apart so the strand didn’t felt onto itself. After about five minutes the squishiness of the yarn mass pretty much disappeared, indicating the felting/fulling had pretty much completed.

So I rinsed it all out in warm water, then quenched it in cold water and wrung it out. After drying it was perfect for my needs and matched the felted-fulled sporran perfectly.

Before you do a big batch I recommend you do a few yards worth of chain first to see if you like the resulting felted yarn and then knit a swatch to see how the fabric turns out.

You could do this with much longer lengths of yarn and I bet putting it in the washer would work for felting but I haven’t tried that. Use a small load setting and put in several pairs of jeans to fill up the tub. I would also put the yarn chain in a mesh bag so it has more contact with itself. You will want to check it every few minutes.

Of course you may get a big tangle, so one thing I know works is you can do it by hand in sections. Gather up a good handful of the crocheted chain and work it in the sink or tub – maybe this would be a good bath time project? – and massage the yarn into felted/fulled goodness. Stop whenever you think it is felted enough. You could even just felt it part way so the fibers are about half matted and you can still see the chains, but everything is firmly unified for knitting purposes.

Like I said, as you are crocheting the chain you can combine colors for a striping effect, especially if you are using thinner yarn, where you can crochet two strands at once.

Let me know if this lights up your life. I’d like to hear what results you get. I haven’t made the time to do a bigger project with this, so can’t show you anything at this point.

How to save the planet with Knitting.

More and more lately I’ve become irritated by the prevalence of plastic in my life. Even when I try to buy less plastic, more of it comes home with me. I’ve been trying to use less, as well as shift to BPA-free containers. I stopped drinking out of the large plastic tumblers I’ve been using for years now. I won’t store food in plastic unless it’s just in the freezer, and I’m no longer buying baked goods that come in those plastic boxes at the grocery. For a while I was still buying my croissants there and couldn’t bring myself to throw away the tubs, which are about six inches deep, fifteen long and twelve wide. I have a stack of six of them with their lids and hope either to find a use for them or a friend who has recycling in their neighborhood.

So what about knitting in all this? I have all these plastic grocery bags. Yes, I can take them to the recycling box at the store, and I keep some in the car and take a few in to use when I shop, but I came up with another idea for recycling these spawn of petroleum.

Last weekend one of my cats, Lucy, got hold of a ball of yarn and was nuzzling it to death. I rescued it before it became a hopeless tangle and gave her a small ball of Wool-ease bulky to play with, but she wasn’t crazy about the acrylic any more than I was, so I sat down and crocheted her a ball out of the wool she was nuzzling. It is just a simple free-form ball you can make up as you go, so don’t look for instructions here. Anyways, when I was done I stuffed one of my stash of grocery bags inside and crocheted it shut.

Lucy loves it. The plastic bag inside makes a soft rustling noise, but the toy is soft and squishy and she can nuzzle it all she wants and it won’t come apart.

So my next thought is that a great way for us to recycle these bags is to use them to stuff pet toys and kids toys and even pillows. It occurred to me that the bags would shift around a bit in a pillow so, thinking about plarn, I came up with the idea to knit or crochet a pillow blank from bags to make a stable foundation for a pillow or other toy. Crochet is easier to do for this and all you really need is structure, not appearances.

But as you know, plarn can be laborious to make. So I came up with Super Plarn. To make super plarn take a bag and find the two insets or gussets on either side of the bottom of the bag. Pinch them together and then pierce a hole across the bag with your fingers. Then take the handles of the next bag and thread it through this hole. Next, thread the bottom of the second bag through it’s own handles and pull it tight. Keep repeating this until you have enough to work with. Because of the varying thickness of the result – handles are less bulky – it won’t look so good but this works fine for stuffing material since it won’t show.

Because of the bulky linking “knots” you may not love the feel if you draw them very tight, but if you keep those links between bags a bit loose it won’t be bad. You could also just cut the bags sideways in very wide bands and link them that way but you would be wasting the handles and bottoms.

Here’s a pic of five bags finger-crocheted together:

I tried crocheting this with a size Q crochet hook but it was difficult and tight and not really necessary. Just finger-crochet a chain wide enough for your pillow, chain one or two more, then turn and skip one or two links and begin either a chain stitch or single crochet back in the other direction. IMPORTANT: start crocheting or knitting with a handle end of the super plarn chain so you can add more bags to the bag-bottom end if you run out.

Keep going until you can fold up this pad to the bulkiness you want for your pillow or toy or whatever. The result will be a stable, squishy pillow form with a soft crinkle sound that will remind you of how you are saving the planet, one pillow and dozens of plastic bags at a time.

Below are two videos sent to me by my penpal Larisa. She knits socks using 5 crochet hooks instead of DPNs and it’s pretty fast. Very cool idea. I hope you can pick up the idea from the videos. I bet of you could keep track you could do patterns with this method. The videos require Quicktime to be installed on your computer. The video will take a couple minutes to download.

Fast sock knitting with crochet hooks.

Hook Knitting Detail Video

Well, my laziness about my knitting projects and supplies has come to a head. I don’t have much yarn my any standards. After all, I’ve only been knitting for a few months, but I never really got a good set up to keep my yarn and now I’ve had enough of the mess and have finally got it managed. I’ve been the sort that had a bag of yarn or stuff from the store and just used that to store the supplies in. The bags and balls of yarn were all over the place, mostly all over the dining table and surrounding area. Here’s what it looked like.

A little blurry, a lot messy.

I’d wanted a cabinet of some sort to keep it all in but didn’t want to invest in another piece of furniture, and I didn’t want some junky piece from a thrift store. Looking for a gift for my mother for Christmas I found myself at Target, in the far back corner where the closet organizing stuff is, and ran across their Sterilite plastic storage chests. I bought one with three drawers and one with five (both were the same size, but the second had four small drawers and one large) for under $25 and went home to tackle the monster.

As you can see by the before and after pictures it made a big difference. I can actually eat at my dining table without having to move yarn and knitting first.

Yes! The Yarn has been conquered.

The wool is in the wool drawers, the blends and other sorts of yarn are all in their own drawers, and the various tools and needles all have their places. My great knitpicks.com ball winder is put away, my crochet needles are separate from the knitting needles. The many started projects are in appropriate drawers in stead of lying all over the place accusing me of what I’m guilty of (neglect, distraction and indecision), and I have my sanity back. Some of it.

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I have been learning to knit over the last two months. When I first really looked into knitting and found some great books at the stores I was very excited about cables, for one thing. Cable knit garments looked so odd – not that I had never seen them before. It was just cool that you could do that with knitting, what with all the patterns you could make moving the cables left and right.

Then I tried doing cables. Not so much fun. Using a cable needle was a bit cumbersome. A couple of times, with my slippery nickel plated Options needles I have lost loops off my left or right needle in the process and had to restrain my panic as I prayed to the knitting angels that I could retrieve them. Maybe cables should be done on bamboo by default, I thought. No.

Then I discovered, as in a recent post, that you can do cables without needles in a sort of pinch and switch method. I’ve experimented with this and while it sure looks easy on video, and maybe is easier with larger needles, for a tighter knit on smaller needles it is more precarious than using a cable needle. I thought there had to be a better way.

I had come across a cable thimble on another web site and wondered if that would be a useful tool, but found no instructions on how to use it. I tried making one myself with wire, but still couldn’t figure it out. Plus, the little cable thimble sells for about 10.00 USD and that wasn’t worth it.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am starting my Fountains pattern scarf in red superwash by Cascade. Well, after all the above experimentation, struggling with the pinch and switch method, I just about quit last night. I all but ripped it out. I even decided on another pattern called “lighted torches” that doesn’t have any cable crossovers.

Then an impression came into my mine, and image from the Angels of knitting: use a crochet hook held in the right hand along with the right needle to temporarily hold the outer loops while doing the swap with the inner loops. So I tried it this morning with a crochet hook and it worked! It was much easier to manage the switcheroo of the loop sets. No struggling with the tightness of the loops, no fear of losing loops, and it seemed quicker to do.

Here’s how to do cables this way. You are ready to do your crossover. Let’s say it is a three plus three crossover. I chose a crochet hook to give me the extra security for the loops in limbo, and it keeps the loops from closing down. Use a crochet hook that is a size or two smaller than your knitting needle – this makes the loop transfers a bit easier. I used a size 5 hook with a size 6 needle. Hold the crochet hook along side the right needle. If your instructions say to hang the cable needle in the back, then put the crochet needle in back of your right needle and in front if it says to hang the cable needle in front.

The switcheroo with the loop sets on the right needle and hook, ready to be moved back to the left. And Max makes an appearance as well at the upper right. I was using his needles.

Use the crochet hook to pick up the first three (outer) loops off the tip of the left needle. Then slip the next three (inner) loops from the left needle to the right needle. Now slip the outer loops from the crochet hook back to the left needle, and lastly use the left needle to pick up the three loops you slipped to the right needle. Now you are ready to just resume knitting.

Summary of the switcheroo:

1. Slip first set of loops from left needle to crochet hook at the back or front of the right needle per your pattern instructions.

2. Slip second set of loops to the right needle.

3. Slip first set of loops from crochet hook to the left needle.

4. Drop the crochet hook when it’s empty.

5. Slip second set of loops back to the left needle. All loops have been returned to the left needle.

6. Knit the loops.

7. Get up and dance around.

As you can see, it’s a good bit different from using a cable needle. The hook is used to rearrange the loops before knitting them and is not let go of until the loops are rearranged. Then you drop it and knit all the loops for the crossover without interruption. With a cable needle you transfer the first half to the cn, knit the other half, knit the first half off the cable needle. In any case, this way seem less clumsy and more secure as I don’t ever loosen my grip on the left needle. I’ve had my left needle slip out of loops while working with the cable needle.

So now the world is a better place. We can cable without fear. I just knew that scarf was not going to be fun until this idea came to me. I just hope it makes cables easier for some as it has for me.

I know that’s backwards, but I couldn’t resist.

I got my ball winder from knitpics.com the other day and it’s pretty cool. Very affordable at just 19.99. I didn’t have any skeins I wanted to ball up yet so I turned its fury on a scarf I crocheted back in May before I decided to get into knitting. It was the bulky Wool-ease in a sort of oatmeal color. The scarf didn’t excite me, just done in alternating rows of dc done in the back loop. It had an interesting accordion like texture but seeing it was 105 degrees outside I was not too attached to it. I decided to canibalize it for a cossack hat and so threw it to the hungry ball winder.

The top of the winder has a sort of notch to hold the start of the yarn but it’s not cut right for a bulky yarn. Once I got it started it made short work of the scarf. I held it to the floor with a foot and just wound away. The ball winder is designed to put more distance between the turns of the yarn than I would have thought. As you can see in the picture it’s not closely wound. So the ball was bigger than perhaps necessary, and being bulky yarn it turned into a ball that was a little too large for the winder to finish.

It was crochet; it had to be destroyed.

.

So now I have a very cool ball of yarn to turn “reinyarnate” into a hat. (Read about technique below…)

Proof of Reinyarnation

There is a bit of a technique to using a ball winder. One thing I find is that if I don’t control the incoming yarn it will flop about a lot and the ball will be kind of loose and larger when done. So what I do is take a small piece of fabric and hold it loosely around the strand of yarn so that it keeps a very mild tension on the line. This produces a somewhat smaller ball and deters the yarn from tangling in the wire yarn guide.

Another thing I do is put the source skein or ball in a shoebox or paper bag on the floor. Backing up a bit: I clamp my ball winder to the back of a chair and put the source yarn on the floor below it. So with the source in a bag or box it won’t travel all over the room.

And sometimes I will put the source on a vertical paper towel holder if I can get the rod through the ball/skein easily. This helps more with oblong skeins you buy at craft stores as when they are being unwound they can flop about a lot in the bag or box. Don’t expect them to actually turn on the towel holder, and at a certain point you will have to deal with the last bit of yarn flopping about oddly anyway.

I find the ball winder very handy, and use it to rewind balls for projects that I’m restarting, or when I’m done with part of a ball, as the ball becomes squishy when you pull from the center and it’s nice to put it back in good order for storage or further use. And you can in many cases, of course, rewind and rip out at the same time, straight back to the ball.

Last Sunday I went to my nearest local yarn/knitting shop, Gails Knits, to take advantage of their summer sale and bought yarn for my first project, the cabled scarf with seed stitch border you see in the page header (That’s a pic from the book – I haven’t started the scarf yet, but I did pick red. ) and as I was checking out I told Gail about the Portuguese Knitting DVD and how much I liked the style. I showed her the basics, and she in turn showed me her style, which is eastern european knitting (EEK). Apparently, it’s pretty rare. She said there was an article some years ago in a knitting magazine that listed the top ten styles of knitting, and it was number 9.

It turns out it is a bit faster than Portuguese knitting, seemingly having one less step in that you don’t have to flick the yarn over the needle. That’s not a big chore, but when I was watching Gail demonstrate it she was amazingly fast. I’ll have links to videos and pages here soon. It’s a variant of continental knitting, a pick style, and is quite worthwhile.

I’m still practicing but I did find that it wasn’t so great for a bulky yarn. I am doing a cossack hat from the Folk Hats book by Vicki Square and even with my nice and pointy new Options Nickel Plated circulars didn’t work so well on the thick, bulky Wool-ease yarn by Lion Brand when using EEK. I couldn’t catch the yarn and pull it through. So I tried the Portuguese knitting and it was much easier.

That’s interesting and handy to know. Now we have more tools with which to knit. I’ve learned one should choose carefully from knitting style, yarn material, yarn thickness, needle material and pattern. When I started out I would never have thought it mattered.

Here’s what the hat will look like when done:

The cossack hat in the book.

The hat is from Folk Hats by Vicki Square, pages 88-90. This one uses a bouclet yarn which seems to emulate shearling. I may do one with black later. For now I’m just re-using the yarn from the crochet scarf I killed playing with my new ball winder.

I just ordered some needles from China – a couple 15 pc sets of circs in 2 lengths, a set of 15 bamboo needles and a set of ten crochet hooks. It was a great buy. I just hope the quality is good. If not, I could them myself. I can smooth, sand, refinish or reshape if I need to, but it may end up being a lot of labor I don’t need.

I plan to use that also in a test to see if I can give them crochet tips myself, as I want to experiment with hook knitting. I tried it with some crochet hooks a few days ago and it was quite easy to knit that way. It was mentioned that they use hooked knitting needles in Portugal and elsewhere, so this may come in handy.