What to Do When You Have Three Hours, a T-shirt, and a Skein of Yarn on Hand

Ute Rehner, a Facebook user and a member of the Heute Strick Ich Faceboook community page, decided one afternoon that she needed something to wear for an evening appointment. She took a plain charcoal gray jersey top and a single skein of Rowan Kidsilk Haze Glamour, and set to work, knitting a collar and cuffs, cutting away part of the original neckline and sleeves from her shirt, and then pinning and stitching the knitted ones in place, all in the space of three hours. The result looks wonderful — you can see more pictures and Rehner's narrative on here.

This is definitely a great idea for making a lovely little top that can be worn almost anywhere, will flatter most women, and that isn't going to take much time or money. But if I try it, I'll be allowing myself more than three hours of leeway for the job. I have never found that knitting and tight deadlines marry well.

Today's Knitting is Yesterday's News

If you're still one of those who indulge in the delightfully archaic practice of reading the newspaper on actual newspaper, or if your local newspapers are so desperate to entice you to do so that they leave freebies on your front porch, you may be wondering what to do with the paper once you've read it. Well, if you're a knitter, you can turn it into yarn and knit things with it. Back in 2007, Design Academy Eindhoven student Greetje van Tiem, from the academy's Man and Leisure department, presented a graduation show project that involved old newspapers into yarn that can be woven into carpets, curtains and upholstery. Accordng to van Tiem, each sheet of newspaper yields twenty yards of yarn.





Italian artist Ivano Vitali, who is interested in zero waste art and was experimenting with tapestries made of backdated newspapers, plastic bags, eggshells and aluminum foil nearly forty years ago, now works almost exclusively in recycled newsprint.





Vitali makes not only art installation, but newspaper garments that are not only quite attractive but even wearable. He produces different colours in his garment by carefully pre-sorting the newspapers before producing the yarn. And these are remarkably well-cut styles, but I can't help wondering what would happen if one got caught in the rain in newsprint knitwear. Mightn't it disintegrate completely?





I don't think for instance, that I'd have the nerve to go swimming in this Ivano Vitali-made bikini.

If you'd like to give knitting with newsprint a try, you might begin by checking out this Craftster tutorial on how to make newspaper yarn.

Why a Knitter Shouldn't Marry a Rollerskater

Franklin Habit of The Panopticon brings us an animated drama showing us what would happen if Queen Elizabeth, who is a knitter, were married to a roller-skating Albert Einstein.

Knitting Fables

I've previously done a "knitting narratives post", for which I wrote fictional captions for various photos of knitting weirdness. It did quite well pageview count-wise, and so I have decided to start doing these knitting fable posts fairly regularly, say, twice a month. This may be my frustration over not getting to my novel-in-progress talking, and probably no one finds my captions as hilarious as I do, but I find them easy and a lot of fun to write. With knitwear this bizarre, the jokes write themselves.

Many of the pictures and captions below have already appeared on this blogs's Facebook page, but there are a couple of new ones. From now on I'll try to be sure that at least half the entries are new.





Chantal has always really gotten off on static cling: the flyaway hair, the crackly sounds, the slight electric charge, the feeling that her undies might be showing. She was sure she couldn't be the only person who felt that way, and her newest knitwear creation was designed to give the wearer that fresh-out-of-the-dryer, forgot-the-fabric-softener feeling.





Lola thought her knitted outfit needed just a little something more to jazz it up a bit, so she tied a legwarmer around her leg just above the knee. There, she thought, that was just what it wanted. Like her mother always said, a classic look does require a touch of the unexpected if it's not to look staid and boring.





Ginevra thought she'd come up with the perfect design for an après-ski outfit: a tensor bandage or cast from any ski injuries would fit right underneath, if she spilled a drink the mark would just blend in, and it complemented her husband's lederhosen.





Tarquin is a complicated man, and no one understands him but his knitwear designer, Bikram yoga instructor, and shadow puppet coach.





Dr. Void was proud of the way her knitting project had turned out. She'd made a sweater that looked polished and professional and that could double as a Rorschach inkblot test for her patients in her psychiatry practice.





Whenever one of the kids woke up crying in the night, Grace always put on her special face mask and Fred quickly donned his Insane Gopher Man costume before they went to their child's room. As they told their friends at Curling Club, one of the parenting how-to books they'd read had said that they could help their children lose their fear of nightmares by making reality even more terrifying.





Yvonne had hoped her new dress would do double duty for her position as High Priestess of Loki and for her job as a claims adjuster, but then the Bishop of her diocese told her The Book of Loki forbid the use of hot pink in ceremonial robes for any priestess above the rank of Semi-Exalted. These weekend role playing games could certainly get exacting but then, as Yvonne reminded herself, that was what she liked about them.





Morticia hoped her new spring dress wasn't too young or bright or pretty for her. Gomez had been enthralled and Thing had given her a thumb up, so she decided it would do.





Per her therapist's instructions, Suzette dutifully swathed herself in fabric from her mother's sewing room and afghans from the rec room couch, sat in the woods behind her family's house, and said to herself, "I am a princess. I am a princess. I am a princess," for two hours every day. But after two weeks, when her self-esteem didn't seem to be improving, she began to think her therapist was full of it. Maybe, Suzette thought, the way to feel better about herself was to dump her douchebag boyfriend, train to run a marathon, and begin working towards the career in medical research that she'd always wanted.





Annabella had learned years ago that any stitch gauge snafu could be compensated for if she just threw enough attitude and the right shades into the mix.





When Teoma found she didn't have the goods for slalom kayaking or roller sports, she decided the brand new Olympic sport of rope climbing and knitting would be her best bet of taking home the gold.





Twin sisters Aurora and Dawn had a knitting time ritual: Aurora would strum her ukelele while Dawn sang twelfth century chantefables and knitted. Unfortunately Dawn had only turned out ugly afghans so far, and Aurora was considering suggesting that they switch roles, but the subject had to be approached with care. Aurora remembered well what had happened the time she wanted to be the one who wore the fascinator.

If You've Ever Felt Like Mending a Sweater

Has your favourite wool sweater developed holes? One way to mend the hole, or to embellish a plain sweater, is to needle felt patches over the holes with a small amount of roving and a felting needle. Erica at the blog Honestly WTF has written a tutorial explaining how to make heart-shaped patches for your sweater elbows.






If you want to see a video of the felting patch technique, the one above demonstrates it well. You'll have the option of making the patches in different simple shapes, such as those found in cookie cutters (stars, hearts, trees, Easter chicks or eggs), or if you're feeling really artistic, in more complex creations of your own design: birds, insects, flowers, text, or whatever you like. If you wish to simply mend your sweater unobtrusively, you can try to find roving in a very similar colour, or if that's not possible, mend the sweater with the closest colour of roving you can find and then dye the whole item a new colour.

There are considerations to keep in mind. Felting won't work with synthetic fibres or with superwash wool. To be a candidate for felt patches, your sweater must be natural, non-superwash woolly fibres such as sheep's wool, alpaca, angora, or cashmere. The felt patch, while it may look unobtrusive, will have a very different texture from the rest of the sweater, so you'll have to ask yourself if you'll be okay with that or if you'll be constantly fingering that stiff, lumpy little patch. Needle felting involves fast, forceful stabbing motions within inches of your fingers, and you're bound to stick yourself with the barbed needle at some point in the process, and it will hurt a lot. Felting isn't a quick process, either — darning is faster. The video above, as you can see, isn't real time.

I've never used felt patches to mend my sweaters. I do mend my clothes whenever I can, but I mend knitted items by darning them with the same, or a very similar, colour. And generally my rule is that mending has to be invisible, or at least unobtrusive, or the item goes out. I'm really not into the grunge/Dickensian urchin look. I must admit though that those heart-shaped elbow patches would be adorable on a little kid's sweater, so there might just be some felt patching in my future.

Political Correctness in the Bag

In Toronto, where I live, plastic shopping bags have been something of a political sore spot recently. A three-year-old by-law mandating a 5 cent charge for plastic bags was revoked effective July 1, 2012, and in the following November a decision by Toronto city council to ban single use plastic bags entirely by 2013 was reversed when it met with strenuous opposition from the Ontario Convenience Stores Association. While the latter political move really was probably too draconian and impractical, at least for the present, I agreed with the mandatory 5 cent charge bylaw and thought it worked well as an incentive to get people to use cloth shopping bags. When the by-law was originally enacted, plastic bags became a much less common sight overnight, and I especially liked that I, who had been already avoiding the used of plastic bags for years, no longer had to tell cashiers "No bag... no bag... no bag... I don't need that bag," before they heard me, because giving out plastic bags was so routine that it was an autopilot task for them. And it reduced Toronto's landfill and waste disposal costs. But our illustrious mayor, Rob Ford, didn't seem to think fiscal and environmental responsibility was a good reason to continue to impose a slight inconvenience on his voters. No, I didn't vote for him, thanks for asking.

Regardless of what the plastic bag status is in your locale, if you want to avoid the use of the plastic shopping bags but are discouraged by the ugliness of the environmentally friendly cloth bags out there, you can always knit your own. There are loads of patterns on the net for such bags, many of them free. I like the one above, from the blog Homebaked Online, which is partly based on a Knitty pattern.





This one from Worsted Knitt is a good basic pattern. These bags will be useful for other things besides grocery shopping, such as heading to the beach. These bags can also be made in your favourite colour, or in a set of different colours to coordinate with your outfits — I know I need more than one bag to bring home a week's groceries.

And if you don't like those I've featured here, check out the selection of string bags on Ravelry.

Knitting Jubilee

How do you make a large-scale yarn bomb or knitted art installation without having to do all the work yourself? By asking the public to help you out, of course. One weekend in June 2010, sculptor Dan Preston, jewellery designer Holly Packer, and some Superblue Design Ltd. employees took 7000 metres of rope, a giant circular knitting loom, and some large plastic balls to Jubilee Park at Canary Wharf, London, and enticed over 100 park visitors into knitting a 72 metre tube.

I'm wondering if I could try something similar the next time I'm behind schedule on knitting Christmas presents.