As most of my lockdown knitting has been premature baby cardigans and children’s hats, which have featured here previously, I have not written a knitting post for a while. This post is about a completed project and one I started recently.
A request to knit a cardigan for a young relative was accompanied by a photo of a shop-bought garment. For once I had no suitable patterns. However, I subscribe to a knitting email. Soon afterwards they offered a downloadable pattern for a pretty cardigan. The yarn for the pattern is Euro Baby Babe Jazz, which is a multi-coloured polyamide/acrylic yarn. I chose Fairy Forest as the shade, ordering it from The Knitting Network’s website.

Cardigan
I was very favourably impressed by the speed of delivery and the minimal, but effective, packaging. Fairy Forest is mainly green and blue. I began knitting in daylight. When I first saw the yarn by (energy saving) electric light I had a shock – it looked blue and yellow. (Do you remember That dress?) Fairy Forest is a magic colour-changing yarn!
I adapted the measurements from the pattern to (hopefully) fit the recipient. I had spare yarn for two hats.
The edging is bell-edging, which is straightforward to knit and very pretty. It was a new stitch-pattern to me.

Knitting kit
My current project is using up yarn from the two Aran-weight garments I have made in recent years. A friend I met at the craft group (which I stopped attending a few years ago) highlighted a charity project on Facebook. The idea is to knit, crochet or weave scarves to equal the length of one of the long-distance footpaths in this county. Dark colours are preferred. The scarves are for homeless people in this county and beyond it.
I cast on 29 stitches using 5.0mm needles (US size 9 pins), which gives the recommended width of 6 ins. There were a number of suggested stitch patterns on Facebook. I decided to use a mixture of knit and purl rows to give a ridged effect. My plan is to have a similar block of the pink yarn at each end of the scarf. I wound the pink yarn until I had two balls of equal weight.
Knitting a long scarf may take a while…
…and may not be the best way to help a homeless person. It is one way of helping and using up yarn, which is otherwise just taking up space.