The Advent wall hanging and its knitted ornaments first appeared on my blog, December 1-24, 2005. I’m posting them on Twitter @textilefusion and Instagram @suzannthompson, too. Hope you’ll follow me to see all 24 ornaments. You can also find them by searching #KnitAdvent.
An intarsia-knit snowman ornament is the second of our knitted Advent calendar. I knitted with embroidery floss, because that seemed an inexpensive way to use lots of different colors.
The 24 ornaments and the calendar wall hanging were published in INKnitters magazine, issues 7, 8, 9, and 10, Winter 2002 through Fall 2003. The project isn’t particularly difficult, but it is time-consuming. So if you knit it, pace yourself
The other thing going on December 2, 2005 was blocking:
It was time to block these cable samples, so here they are, face-down on a bath towel. For small pieces like this, I smooth them out on the towel. The terrycloth provides enough friction to hold them in place. I lay a wet press cloth (old cloth diaper) over them, and touch my iron to the press cloth. This sends steam into the pieces, but doesn’t squish them. The cloth protects them from the hot iron.
While they’re soft from the steam, I tweak the edges and corners if necessary. They cool and dry in less than an hour and they’re done!
The washcloth was another story. It needed blocking to stretch the sides and define the corners. I had to pin the corners, steam, and straighten the sides. This is my one Cloth for Katrina so far. I’ll make another as soon as I find my other ball of cotton.
The cream and pink samples are mostly stitches from Barbara Walker’s Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns. At the left of the pink sample in the foreground, are 4-, 5-, and 6-strand braids. I added one purl stitch between the strands of the braids for the second section. Keeping the stitch count the same, for the third section, I elongated the pattern (cable every fourth row, instead of every other row). Finally, in the right-most quarter, where the color changes, the cable courses are separated by two purl stitches. All the braid patterns are related, and it was fun to work through the variations.