December 28, 2006
A Very Felted Christmas
A lot of the gifts I gave were homemade. Sorry TLC. Anyway, I knit several oven mitts. When The Princess saw the first one she asked if it was the mitten from the book about the boy who loses one of his mittens and all the animals of the forest climb in to stay warm during the cold winter. When he finds the mitten it's super stretched out of shape. That's what these oven mitts resembled pre-felting. (Does anyone happen to remember the name of that story?) They were kinda cute, but wouldn't fit anyone other than the jolly green giant and they definitely wouldn't keep you from burning yourself.
When felting wool for use with hot items it is important to felt until no stitches can be seen at all. This is what that same mitt looked like after 3 goes through the wash cycle. I still have a top loading machine and I put a couple of oven mitts into the washer with a couple pairs of jeans. I would let the washer run for about 15 minutes and then go set it back at the beginning of the cycle. This little mitt had to be stretched a bit to fit comfortably through the palm. I love how the stripes show after the felting.
Finally, here is a picture of the entire "kitchen set" given to The Princess. It contains one hand towel made of cotton yarn, 2 miniature Mason/Dixon Warsh Rags. I call these miniatures because the pattern has you cast on 45 and knit for 13 brick rows (that's what I call them, because that's what they look like!). Anyway for these I cast on 33 stitches and knit until I had 9 rows of bricks. They are just slightly smaller. Each kitchen set got 2 - each with the colors reversed. The set I gave The Musical One is more greens and since her wool was solid one of her cotton colors was variegated. I refused to make another dishtowel after these two however, so the Sister-in-Law only got an oven mitt and 2 dishrags.
The final bit of felting was 2 purses. The pattern started life as the Rick Rack Purse from knitpicks.com. I am not affiliated with this online store in anyway, but I was quite pleased with the service I received. Unfortunately I didn't take any after photos of the purses and they got packed into a plastic tubs for transportation back to Canada. I think they were a hit. Hard to tell.
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Love the mitts - great idea.
ReplyDeleteI love the gifts! I'm sure everyone loved them! The TLC producer who came up with that bright idea for a commercial OBVIOUSLY has craftster envy ;)
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