When I started knitting last year it was the middle of winter and I was working in a freezing cold office here in the mountains. I decided that I needed a pair of fingerless mitts for working at the computer. Instead of using a pattern I decided to improvise with a lace stitch square that would be sewn up the side leaving a hole for my thumb. As you can probably predict, this project went wrong in so many ways. For a start I was using a wool/soy blend yarn which was quite horrible to knit with, especially in lace. As it was my first attempt at lace knitting I had to cast on and knit the ribbing 3 times before I got the pattern right, I kept mysteriously losing and gaining stitches in all the wrong places (later I found out about threading a piece of yarn through the stitches at the end of the ribbed section - if only I'd known then!). And to top it all off they looked terrible when I finally finished them. I didn't even bother to sew up the second one.
One of the "mittens" before reincarnation
On the positive side, what I did learn was how to draw up a lace pattern on a graph chart and how to read and knit from a chart, which I find much easier than reading the pattern.
So after being stashed away in a drawer for almost a year, I came across these again in last week's tidy up. I also came across 2 empty tea tins that I had stashed away at Christmas time. I try not to collect junk as we don't have the room for it in our little cottage, but I thought these tins could be useful for something. And so, two lost souls have come together in a new form. I painted the tins black and stitched up the misused mitts to form a pretty little tin cozy. One of which is now an ideal container for storing my collection of old straight needles and the other will be a gift for someone in my family.
T2 tea tins getting overhauled: Monk Pear and Girlie Grey (my favourite)
Posts
