Knitting and Irritation

Okay, all. I know this is a quilting blog, but I do knit sometimes. In the summer, I knit. When it's cold, I quilt. It's just how it's turned out over the years. Besides, I don't care too much if my yarn gets dirty, but I pitch a fit if my fabric does before I can wash it again. *grin* That makes my knitting projects much easier to drag outside or to baseball as the case may be.

Now, off to my irritation. Every year, my mom joins a craft fair and will lovingly take some of my crafty stuff in to sell alongside hers. She does stained glass so it's not a conflict of crafts here. This year, I'm leaning towards knitted stuff instead of quilted. I find that I don't mind knitting for money, but detest quilting or sewing for money. I'm odd like that. This year, I thought gifts with a good use for them would be a good thing. I discovered that these "old" dish cloths are incredible! I made several for myself and I love them a lot more than my store bought ones. So, I decided to start making a few to sell. I currently have 2 ready to sell and 1 ready to go into my own drawer. The one that's for me is a "scrap" cloth. I made it out of left over yarn. I don't care, I just like how they work. *smile* THEN, I got this marvelous idea to make 2 dish cloths using this pattern with a coordinated dish towel. Great idea, right? Well, I'm finding out that it was a lot easier to find a pattern for dish cloths than it is for dish towels. I found one that was pretty, but then discovered that the pattern that was stated did NOT work for the pictured dish towel. I'm not an advanced enough knitter to figure it out for myself. If it was a quilt pattern, I could probably figure it out. Oh, well! I finally just pulled out my knit stitches book (hubby bought it for me for a buck at Barnes and Noble awhile back) and started flipping. My main problem now is that it can't be too fancy as that takes too long, not to mention the fact that my yarn is variegated. I'm finding out that you can't do anything too fancy because it just gets "eaten" by the color changes in the yarn. Great.

I started to do my dish towels with a simple weave pattern. Nope. With the yarn I'm using (the colors are fairly bright) the pattern looked horrible! So I pulled out all 13 rows I'd done and started looking again. There is a pattern in my book called "flame" that might work. Again, it will probably get "swallowed up" by the color changes, but the idea of a 'flame' would work a lot better with these colors than the weave did. Hopefully I'll get a chance to find out soon.

Well, it's late and I think it's time to call it quits. Maybe I'll get this whole dish towel thing worked out. If not? Well, that cotton yarn makes great dish cloths. LOL