The other night at our newly formed craft night, Emily mentioned the Knitting Daily new poetry contest. I remembered that I had been given one of those magnet sets at a trade show a couple of years ago. I dug it out, and decided to try a Haiku. This is what I came up with:

Knitting Daily Magnetic Poetry

We’ve been having a great time at our Wednesday night craft sessions, trying out new things each time. I love that it’s crafting with no purpose–No deadlines, no recipient or even finished project in mind, we’re just exploring and experimenting. The first session was fusing plastic bags:

Fused Plastic Bag Wallet

The following week, Emily taught us how to cut fabric from one large sheet (I used an old sheet and a pair of curtains I had gotten at the thrift store) into yarn by zig-zagging your cuts of layered fabric. Emily, a blogger who comes to these gatherings has a fabulous blog and has done a great job of writing about our craft nights. She gives a detailed post about making the fabric too.

IMG_5630

Here’s our finished yarn. I haven’t crocheted anything with mine yet.

Homade Fabric Yarn

The next week, we had a few friends who wanted to learn to crochet. Lisa and Esther are great knitters, but they are new to crochet–at our last knitting group meeting I had taught them each to chain, and they were ready to move on. They both mastered single crochet at craft night, I’ve since taught Lisa double crochet and she’s ready to start a project.

That night, Heidi blazed through a scarf using a great variation on Turkish Stitch. Heidi knits in the “Eastern” method, meaning all her stitches are crossed. This works especially well for this particular lace stitch:

At our knitting group, several folks demanded she write down the pattern, and she asked me to “translate” it into pattern language. Hopefully she’ll correct me if I’ve gotten it wrong. Essentially, she cast on a multiple of 3 stitches plus 2 for the edges.

[ETA]: Heidi did send a correction in the comments, here it is: K1, *(yo, s1, k2tog-tbl) repeating from * across, end with k1. On the wrong side rows, the yarn over and the slipped stitch stitch are the k2tog-tbl from the row below.

Tanya is a vetran crocheter, she even had a crocheted hat line when she lived in Austin, TX. She made a coat for her daughter’s new webkin:

Webkinz Coat

This past wednesday, we wanted to try making beads from pages of magazines. Again, Emily has the best photographic round-up of this one, I’ll have to lift one, with her permission to give you the idea, but you can get the whole scoop from Emily.

We haven’t yet chosen the next craft we want to attempt–but we’re liking doing things with recycled and repurposed materials.

Knitting Poetry