Can't Stop Knitting

Perhaps a little late in the day, with January all but over, but happy 2015 peeps!
I've been trying to have a chilled out January & just concentrate on making things for fun, experimenting a bit with no real deadline or reason. I've been making birthday presents too, thought I'd get a head start on the year. 

With the weather being rather chilly, I couldn't help but be drawn towards the big chunky balls of wool in my stash! There isn't much better on a damp and cold January evening than getting all snug in front of the TV, surrounded by huge balls of yarn that's the width of a pencil or more.

I got busy with a yummy ball of Rowan Big Wool in shade 65 "Champion" a scrumptious, burnt orange colour (one of my three go-to-colours at the moment, the other two being navy & mustard). 

I think nice, fat yarns work up lovely using a really textured knit. One ball was easily enough to make 2 cosy headbands, just the thing needed to keep your ears warm when out for wintry walks! 
For this sort of project I usually grab my box of "Harmony 101 Stitches to Knit" by Erika Knight. As the name would suggest it contains all you need to knit 101 different stitches, each one detailed on it's own, handy card, just right to slip in with your project on the go. I think it's a great addition to any knitter's library.

For one of the headbands I used the ric rac (or rickrack if you prefer) stitch, so called because (yep, you guessed it) it looks like ric rac. Here's a great YouTube video by New Stitch a Day with all the instructions needed for the stitch.

I used 7mm needles and 16 stitches, it needs to be multiples of 3 +1. Once I was happy it would comfortably fit around my head I cast off and sewed the cast-on and cast-off ends together. For an extra bit of detail I gathered the join and covered it with a small strip of stocking stitch (17 rows of 5 stitches on 5mm needles) and attached a big button in the centre of the strip. The colours of the wool and button are distorted in the picture because they're actually almost identical.

The second was made using the knot stitch or star cluster stitch (the same stitch just known by different names, I've heard a few others too but I think these are the most common- please correct me if I'm wrong). It's a really simple pattern (here's a YouTube video with instructions), more so than above, repeating every 4 rows with all right side rows being plain knit, always good. The wrong side are purl and involves knitting 3 stitches together as well as wrapping the yarn and the needle and knitting into the same stitch, nothing more complicated than that.
I used 13 stitches, this time it's multiples of 4 +1, but I used 12mm needles and although the knit is much looser the headband has a similar width to the ric rac stitch one but obviously needed a lot less rows! I decided just to sew the ends together with this one, I thought the texture was all the detail needed.

Along with the knitting, I've been "making" almost instant rings and by "making" I just meaning gluing a ring finding onto the back of something. I had a great little charity shop find- a kitschy brooch clip for 50p. I removed the back look and glued a silver plated ring finding to the back of it with E6000 glue. Now the reason I mention it was a silver plated was because after wearing it for less than an hour it broke. The glue had held tight but the plating had come away from the finding! I was left with a nice silver circle in the glue, so I filed down the the circle on the ring to the copper before re-gluing and so far it has held tight.

Buttons are always wonderful to make into rings also and the one above, on the right, from my Grandma-In-Law is a real beaut. It looks lovely and old and well-loved and as it was a shanked back button I had to snip that off

. I gave the finding a good file beforehand with this one and I used Hard-As-Nails super glue, also once it had set the following day, I gave it another layer over the top. That button isn't going anywhere (I hope I haven't just jinxed myself)!

I hope 2015 is super, wonderfully, crafty for you. Thanks so much for taking the time to read my blog, it's much appreciated.

Until next time, craft in earnest! Craftin' Ernest x