Innocent

Crafting for charity, and for the fun of it ... 

Do you happen to have any left over yarn in your cupboard?

Until december 1st dutch smoothie lovers can participate in a knitting campaign to support the elderly in need of a little extra attention, as set up by Innocent.

She's three...

I can't believe how fast it all went... my baby has just turned three. A nostalgic present I made her was this travelling pouch for the little bunny rabbit. I wonder if many of you remember them from your own childhood. I recall making several when I was about 10 years old: cut off the bottom of a plastic canister (shower gel, fabric softener, whatever), pierce holes along the rim, and crochet a lovely pouch in no time! The exciting new thing in it for me was knitting an I-cord. I saw this at knittinghelp.com and had wanted to try it for a long time (just never got to it until now).

Kitten paws

Yes, these took f o r e v e r to finish, I know. Not because of this wonderful free pattern by Kristina, but because I had my stubborn mind set on using this fluffy, hairy yarn that would make them look especially kitten-like (or so I imagined). Arrrrgh!! That yarn was EVIL! There was no way to tell the wrapped from the unwrapped stitches, it was even ever so hard to distinguish purled and knit stitches from one another. And impossible to count the rows too. As I'm a severe case of baby-brain at the moment, I kept losing track of how many stitches I'd done, and had to start over again, and again, and again.... But: I love the pattern, and the seamless tips are nice and soft for warming tiny hands. You should be able to do these in a few hours, if you use kind, manageable yarn that is :))
EDIT: Kristina's site has moved here.

Knitware!

When reading some posts at the knitting forum on Craftster, I stumbled upon Linda's lovely blog. She posted a link to free pattern drafting software which I went to investigate right away. Knitware Design is offered for free, by a company called Great Knit Designs -and it IS great!!!
The demo version can do almost everything the paid version does, and it's not even limited to a trial period! It comes in three parts: Basics, Sweaters and Skirts & shawls. Installing it was easy, and the program itself is not hard to get going either (nope, never read a manual ;)) The green cardi was done with the Sweater program; Basics lets you design things like doll clothes (of course Miepie needed a cardigan too) and even dog sweaters!!! Enough for now, I have to hurry back to my needles...

One, two... three!

With autumn stealthily approaching, knitting fever hit me again. On visiting knitting-crochet.com I came across this pattern for fast and easy (tiny) baby booties, from Jean Jenner. There was no picture, but when I tried it out it proved so super cute that I wanted to try making a pair that would fit my toddler. The first try came out way too big (of course :P) but the final result turned out lovely, don't you think?
I've drawn a pattern for it, using a very helpful (and free downloadable!) knitting font that can be found at Aire River Design, as I find charts much easier to knit from than written instructions. I'll be happy to share the pattern, or swap it for some other nice pattern/link/tip or trick! Just holler if you're interested ;)

Consider this:

Setting up and keeping up a website is a time consuming enterprise. Promoting it on the web even more so. Let's say you really put your heart into it, and many hours of your valuable spare time. If you provided your readers with high quality content, and gave them wonderful free stuff to download as well, you'd expect them to be glad, wouldn't you? And just suppose that they are, would you think they'd let you in on it? No they won't! Not even 1 in 1000 visitors makes the effort to let you know they appreciate what you did! So why not be that happy exception and say thanks, or send a pic if you've used somebody's free patterns????!!! One generous lady that has such a high quality content website is Jessica Tromp. She offers countless free knitting charts, patterns, crochet and more. And in addition she helps you out if you're badly in need of knitting help too! So: hooray for Jessica, and all the others that make the internet a wonderful place!!!
The above sweater is done from one of Jessica's hello Kitty knitting charts. Kitty fans: don't miss her adorable hello Kitty felt toy pattern.

Socks!!!

These baby socks I knitted (yes!! I DID!!!) for a friend of mine, who's first baby is due in December. I never knitted real socks before, and it was way easier than I thought!! Just plainly following directions, not making it difficult by trying to figure out why or how :))
As this is just one of my never ending series of experiments (Can I do this? Oh I wanna try that! and so on)
and as they turned out so great, it was the final excuse I was looking for to open up a blog of my own, and share the fun (and the mistakes) I encountered. That's enough rambling for now, this wonderful free knitting pattern is by Patti Pierce Stone
and her site I found through Jessica's superb site (literally tons of free knitting patterns there)