Woolly Wreath from The Village Yarn Shop - Day 4

Getting crafty…

As I said, crafts other than knitting are not my thing.  I don’t scrapbook, garden, or any of that stuff.  I used to sew in my younger days, but that was more a function of my theater major costume shop training and the cost of clothes long enough to fit my near 6’ frame rather than any artistic desire.  I was into beads for a while, but nothing has ever stuck with me the way knitting has continued to do.

Turn my knitting into home decor?  The prospect makes me nervous.  I’ve done a pillow, but those are just knitting with stuffing in them.  I keep staring at the swath of loops sitting in my living room and wondering if they’ll look mangy when I get it on the frame.  I picture my husband coming home and saying, “what’s that growing out of the wall?”

The good news is that this part is relatively easy.  I take the white muslin supplied in my kit, cut in into 4” strips, and wrap it diagonally around the circular frame.  Hey, I should be able to handle that.

And I do.  The muslin has just enough stretch—especially when wrapped on the diagonal—to hug the frame.  Even that doesn’t matter because this is just “primer” for the knitting overcoat to come.  So it’s easy for me to feel a modicum of success when I get this right.

I remain cautiously optimistic.  Stay tuned.

Woolly Wreath from The Village Yarn Shop - Day 3

Is it a scarf, a wreath, a beast?

I really do feel like I’m stitching up some sort of fuzzy animal.  Whenever I pull this out of my bag in public, people stop and ask questions.  Looks like an outrageous scarf, don’t you think?  It probably could be if I stopped here—which of course I won’t.  People are always astonished to find out I’m knitting a wreath.  Everybody wants pictures of the finished product.

As I said in my previous post, this is not as quick a project as you would think.  Because you work each stitch three times, it’s easy to miss a step.  I can't tell you how many times I finished a row with the wrong number of stitches!  Luckly, that is simple to remedy with a K2TOG because the true stitches are hidden behind all that loopy lushness.  The other thing I learned was to keep the finished product to my right, because my knitting needles kept getting caught in the loops if the thing was on my left.

It’s construction—rather than stitching—from here on in.  This makes me nervous.  Accomplished knitter that I am, many “crafts” elude me.  My parenting books sent me on a lot of speaking engagements to church mothers groups, and I’ve botched more MOPS Crafts than I care to admit.  And we will not discuss my track record with Play-Doh.

Next up, we build the frame.

Woolly Wreath from The Village Yarn Shop - Day 2

Not so fast...

Hey, wait a minute…this is trickier than it looks.

Here I was thinking this would be a long swath of easy knitting, a quick project.  I never learn.  This is quite a finger-tangling little challenge.

Essentially, you work each stitch three times—at least on alternate rows.  You knit into the front of the stitch, pull the yarn down through the needles to loop at around your pinky, then bringing it back up to knit into the back of the stitch.  Then, since you’ve essentially increased one stitch, you decrease it back by slipping the first stitch over the second.  So, while your row is an easy nine stitches long, you’re actually working twenty seven stitch motions.  It makes the other rows—the ones where you simply purl along the back of the work—feel like cake walks.

Don’t get me wrong—it’s pretty.  Much more three-dimensional than the usual knitting.  It rather reminds me of Andy, the dog from Lamb Shoppe in Denver.  Or a Muppet.  Or an albino woolly caterpillar--which, while I thought I made that up, really does exist.

Which reminds me: I stared at the headline for the last post for three days, trying to figure out what didn’t look right, until I realized “Woolly” was missing an “o”.  Sigh.  This is why God gives me editors…