It’s been a hot minute since the last time I wrote about my crafting adventures, and you guys must be dying for an update. No, it’s okay, you don’t have to rush to affirm my suspicion. Imma go ahead and give you that update anyway.

I go through phases with crafting, as with reading. Lately, I’ve been on a knitting kick. As I’ve written before, I have struggled far more with learning how to knit than I did with embroidery; I don’t find it as intuitive. Because I’m a contrary sort of person, the challenge is making me double down on knitting in this case – as opposed to give up, which is an equally likely response on my part to recreational endeavours that don’t go the way I want them to. Anyway, I’m knitting all the time, and I am determined to eventually make a finished product with which I can be 100% satisfied. I’m not there yet, but I’m moving slowly in the right direction.

I have learned a few basic patterns/stitches in the meantime, including garter, stockinette, ribbing, seed, rice, moss, star stitch, and Chinese weave. In the course of my struggle with seed stitch, I finally learned how to read my stitches, which has been a tremendous help. I would like to experiment more with slip stitch patterns, but for now, I am focusing my energies on the aforementioned quest to make some sort of useful product.

I did make a striped scarf, which didn’t turn out too badly.

Making one of sufficient size – I like my scarves to resemble blankets, really – takes a long time, but it’s not difficult. I could just stick to making these in perpetuity (there is an almost infinite number of colour combinations to pursue) but how many scarves does one woman – and her nearest and dearest – need? Finding simple patterns online for making non-scarf items has been challenging. I bought a book of patterns, but later realized that they were all either too advanced for me (all the ones I liked, basically) or not quite my style. There was an exception; I did use one of the easier patterns to make a very nice scarf for my husband.

My own pattern-making skills are laughable, so I haven’t tried anything too adventurous. This was my first attempt at an envelope-style clutch:

For the record, this was supposed to be done in seed stitch, but I messed up – which is what happens when you try to follow online instructions, and also don’t know how to read your knitting. Anyway, I think the rib stitch works just fine for this. I added a snap and a decorative brooch (an old beading project) and was not wholly displeased with the result.

My most recent attempt at a self-made pattern was an obi-style wrap belt. To back up, I learned a bit about increasing and decreasing by following a headband pattern I found online (this one). Here’s a pic of that project:

I used a slightly modified approach to make my belt. On the ends, rather than increasing by one stitch every other row, I increased by 2 (one at each end of the row). The body of the belt was done using a star stitch pattern; I mostly eyeballed the width, and the nice thing about this type of design is that it can be customized pretty easily.

The hardest parts to make were actually the ties; I braided them out of the same yarn as the rest of the belt, but then decided to get fancy and add beads at the end of each “tassel”. Threading them onto the yarn was a total pain in the you-know-what. Still, I think the result looked pretty good.

That about sums up my recent knitting adventures. If you have easy (and free) patterns to recommend for my next project(s), leave me a comment!