Knitted cushion cover

The quest continues.

I've been trying to keep going with knitting and learn new techniques and stitches.

If you've looked at my knitting pinterest board you'll have seen there a quite a few knitted cushion covers on there. I couldn't control myself during December.....all i wanted was more cushions everywhere!

I took inspiration from this pin.

Knitting the cover was easy peesy....just knit the whole way. I had a small cushion insert lying around and used it. It's more on the rectangle side of square. For the life of me i can't remember how many stitches i cast on or how many rows a knit...bit of a shame but not a complete disaster....it's finished now so if i ever make another one ill just make it up as i go along as i did on this one.

The only bad bit that happened with this project was the mattress stitching.

I got a lovely knitting book for Christmas and it looks like it has the answer to everything. All the abbreviations and how to stitch them. Unfortunately I'm not so good at reading knitting instructions.

Hello Youtube. What a life saver. I spent ages trying to figure it out by myself but why bother.....there's tonnes of helpful videos out there that take no time to watch and are way easier than trying to mentally work out what written directions are trying to tell you to do.

One side

Then the other

My favourite one i came across was Nancy's video.

In no time at all i had all the side stitched up and the cushion looking semi respectable.

Sadly i did make a mistake (as always) and stitched up one of the sides on the wrong side and then when it came to turning the cover the right way round it looks ridiculous.....but i hide that side from myself now so it's all good.

It's nice to have something easy to knit that then also has a little challenge to it. I'm getting ready to mattress stitch everything now!!

What's your preference, videos or written instructions?

Chloe x

Knitted wristwarmers

In a bid to try and get my ass in gear and post more often, I give you a long awaited post!! This is a prime example of my unorganisation, as I was meant to post about it in November!! Anyway, better late than never I guess.

I've been trying to keep myself occupied now that the darkness seems to be constant in London. Sadly that has meant watching endless amounts of Grey's Anatomy and Breaking Bad ( I've finished season 2 and STILL haven't found out whats so amazing about it).

With this in mind I've decided to turn couch sitting into a productive occasion.......enter knitting!!
I may have mentioned before that it took me three months to knit a scarf a few years ago (said scarf is in the above picture). Well when I was at home last I managed to find a few balls of the same wool and decided to nab it to make a hat with. Sadly I couldn't find a nice* hat pattern (*that was free) so decided instead to change my plans and knit some gloves. While perusing pinterest I stumbled across some lovely moss stitch wrist warmers. Now bearing in mind that I only just finished a tea cosy as my first solo knitting project, these seemed a bit adventurous for my skill level. Surprisingly no. I took some books out of Lewisham library, one of which was the excellent knit step by step. This book definitely helped me complete my wrist warmers.

Nevertheless there were some mishaps. Firstly the pattern calls for 54 stitches to be cast on and I have no idea why. I made them to these specifications and ended up with warmers that could fit both my wrists together with some leftover. Then came the mind boggling task of trying to work out how many stitches my wrists needed. After several attempts I ended up casting on 38 stitches and this seemed to work well. Despite the overestimate on wrist sizes the wrist warmers were pretty easy to do once I got into the flow of it. Moss stitch is a bit slow to knit, endlessly changing from knit to purl but hey....you end up with a really pretty pattern that makes your project look much more impressive that it is!

Sadly even with my new stitch count the two are not the same size.....but for a first time at moss stitch I'm pretty happy to have one slightly baggier than the other.

I also included a little thumb hole....which I wasn't meant to do but I hate having things that aren't far enough down my wrist so I thought having a hole for my thumb would stop the warmers going up my arm. It was easy to do, just don't sew up the whole side!

Have you ever had a project that just didn't turn out right? Or have you knitted something that you are really proud of?

Chloe x

Pop on over to my Pinterest board to see what other knitting patterns are rocking my boat at the moment.


(I do apologise for the over use of the word wrist.....)