You know about the Beekeeper's Quilt, right? It's positively sweeping the (knitting) nation! I fell prey to it immediately because it's the nicest looking scrap project I've ever seen. Now I'm kicking myself that I've given so many sock scraps away over the years. Luckily I still had a goodly bag full of them.
I like this project for a bunch of reasons.
1) Puffy hexagons are cute.
2) I like that the puffy hexagons are knit in the round, no seaming.
3) Furthermore, no seaming the entire thing; it's actually tied together.
4) Since it's pieced at the end, you can make lots of puffs and then decide how the layout/color scheme will work.
5) There are lots of creative ways to puff.
Here are some of the ways I've come up with so far on how to puff, other than with sock scraps:
Handspun. This doesn't really even count as a creative way to puff per se as it's pretty obvious, but I can just sample up any little bit of fiber into a fingering weight, and make puffs from that. Lovely.
Silk Hankies. Knitting from silk hankies was certainly made popular by the Yarn Harlot, and recently I saw a very nice and informative blog post by Maia explaining the process in detail. I happen to have a bunch of silk hankies sitting around, some of which I dyed myself when Jenny Jo and I had a dyeing day at her place. I tried puffing with bamboo DPNs, and that was not happening--imagine me shaking my fist at the heavens and yelling "FRICTION!"-- so I switched over to my beloved ChiaoGoo RED lace needles, and it worked. It's a little fiddly magic looping them, because even though the join on the ChiaoGoo needles is miraculous, the silk has issues. Ideally these would be knit on very slick DPNs, which I don't think I own. It might be an excuse to invest in a set of Signature DPNs, but I'm not that crazy...yet.
Succumbing to my inability to darn.
Delusional me: La, la la, I have every intention of mending these socks. I've kept them for years. I've moved them across the country.
Tough love me: I've knit over two dozens socks while they've languished, injured. It's time to come to grips with myself. They are not going to get darned. There's still plenty of good yarn in those socks: to the puff pile!
The puff pile, by the way, she grows and grows.
I was just wondering earlier today if I was actually crazy enough to try to make one of these! But then I remembered my MIL warning me about the perils of piecing together things with degree-3 vertices. So I think I'll probably resist the urge to knit some hexapuffs until someone I know starts a massively collaborative beekeeper's quilt ...
ReplyDeleteI think the piecing on these is quite forgiving since they're tied together at the vertices and not truly seamed. There's definitely a squoosh factor and no requirement for things to lie 100% flat.
ReplyDeleteI'm enjoying plowing through the yarn I have now, but once I've exhausted the supply, the plan is to keep this as a side project as new leftovers appear. The puffs are just so fun and satisfying and only take 30-40 minutes apiece! I think this will actually motivate me to work down the sock yarn stash, which is by far the most significant chunk of my stash.
Its like tribbles, there are more and more every pic.
ReplyDeleteHello mate great blog posst
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