Posts Tagged ‘easy knitting pattern’
July 30th, 2010 | 
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Worried about taking the needles for your easy knitting patterns through airport security? The official rules for what you can and can’t take on an airplane can be found in an informative pdf document called Rules and Regulations from the Transportation Safety Administration.
Basically, you may take knitting and crochet needles regardless of the material they are made from (metal, plastic, or wood). Also, you may take either plastic or metal scissors as long as they have blunt tips.
The pdf document cited above does not address small needles at all. However, an article entitled Transporting Knitting Needles & Needlepoint on the TSA website specifies
Items needed to pursue a Needlepoint project are permitted in your carry-on baggage or checked baggage with the exception of circular thread cutters or any cutter with a blade contained inside which cannot go through the checkpoint and must go in your checked baggage.
So based on this article, it appears that you could carry on a small sewing or yarn needle, but you need to leave your box cutter and Olfa blades in your checked bag.
In a tip on the Lion Brand website, alert reader Cynthia G. suggests that you carry a printed copy of the TSA rules referenced above when traveling by air. Apparently, not all TSA employees are aware that knitting needles are allowable items.
Another place where having a copy of these rules might come in handy is at a courthouse. (In fact, knowing about this may have saved me some money when I went on jury duty a while back. See an Ezine article I wrote called Easy Knitting Patterns Work Best on These Needles.)
And to be really safe, you might want to carry along a priority mail flat rate envelope with correct postage to either the airport or the courthouse, just in case the guard still won’t let you in with your valuable equipment. Just pop the offensive item in the envelope and mail it back home. (Or if you’re going on a long vacation, address it to your destination.) It will save you from having to go back out to your car when you’re probably running late anyhow.
On a slightly related topic, I discovered a cute children’s pattern for easy-to-spot luggage tags on the Lion Brand website here.
What has been your experience in flying with needles? Leave a comment below and share your story.
Posted in Easy Knitting Patterns, Knitting Tips | 
Tags: airport security, courthouse security, easy knitting pattern, knitting needles, scissors | 
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After figuring out the number of rows and color scheme for my Spumoni Crib Afghan pattern, the only step left is to figure out how much yarn to buy.
There is no magic math, unfortunately, to calculate how many yards of yarn it will take to make a given square of knitted material in a given baby knitting pattern. However, there are some charts available that give some approximate amounts. For a chart from Lion Brand, click here.
The Lion Brand chart gave me a place to start. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Easy Knitting Patterns, Knitting Tips |
Tags: afghan, baby blanket, Baby Knitting Pattern, crib afghan, easy knitting pattern, spumoni crib afghan |
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fabric.com Deal of the Day
Most of the knitting I do is making gifts for others. And most of those gifts are scarves or afghans because they fit with my philosophy of working easy knitting patterns that I can take with me, that don’t require my total focus, and that I’m likely to actually finish. I also tend to buy nice but inexpensive yarn, in keeping with my frugal living philosophy. My usual place to buy yarn is at my local Michaels store. I am signed up for their weekly emails and I try to plan my purchases to make best use of their sales and coupons. (Sign up here.) But not everyone has access to a local store, and sometimes the store doesn’t carry or has run out of a color I want. So I decided to look at the online options. As I quickly discovered, buying just one or two skeins of yarn online is not a good idea because of the shipping costs. By the time you add shipping, the cost of your one skein could easily be doubled or tripled, especially for an inexpensive yarn. That having been said, buying yarn can be a good deal if you need a lot of it. For example, I took a look around to see where the best deal was to buy yarn for the Cromwell Court afghan I reviewed in my last blog entry (Easy Knitting Pattern Review–Cromwell Court Afghan). That pattern takes eight skeins of Lion Brand Wool-ease Thick & Quick yarn which normally retails for $6.99 to $7.99 per skein. I discovered that fabric.com has the lowest price on shipping of any of the yarn websites I’ve looked at
Posted in Easy Knitting Patterns, Knitting Tips |
Tags: amazon, easy knitting pattern, Easy Knitting Patterns, fabric.com, frugal living |
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Most of th
e easy knitting patterns I either present or review on this site are for smaller quick-to-finish items such as scarves and baby blankets. (I try to practice UFO avoidance, as in “un-finished objects.”) But the topic of today’s entry is a grown-up-size afghan that measures about 46 x 54 in. This easy knitting pattern, called “Cromwell Court,” is available for free on the Lion Brand Yarn website here.
Many of those who submitted reviews on the Lion Brand website felt this pattern should be rated Easy+, even though the stated skill level is intermediate. You do need to know how to increase and decrease. In case you haven’t learned that yet, the pattern’s webpage has links to directions within the Abbreviations/References table near the bottom of the page. These directions are very nice, with both drawn diagrams and video to show you how to do it.
This pattern makes up fairly quickly (for an afghan) Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Easy Knitting Patterns, Pattern Reviews |
Tags: afghan, easy knitting pattern, Easy Knitting Patterns, pattern review |
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Here’s a demo on how to work a very easy knitting pattern. This video from YouTube is not the best quality, and it runs almost ten minutes, but she really shows you how to knit a baby blanket, step-by-step. (And loses her glasses somewhere in the middle!) Maybe most importantly, she tells you how much yarn to buy. All you need to know is casting on, knit, purl, and binding off. Really simple!
Although she doesn’t say it in the video, her response to comments on YouTube say that she uses #4 worsted-weight acrylic yarn. She recommends Red Heart Acrylic, which is an inexpensive brand. To make her pattern, you’ll need three 5-oz skeins (or 15 oz total). The blanket is 127 stitches wide and as long as you can make it with the 15 oz of yarn.
She has worked the body of the blanket in stockinette stitch. Once you have her basic info, you can design your own blanket easily enough, using your own favorite stitch patterns. For example, you could use basketweave or seed stitch. For me, starting with someone else’s basic idea and then adding my own twist is the fun part.
In my next entry, I’ll show you my favorite baby knitting pattern.
To view the video, click on “Read the rest of this entry.”
Duration : 0:9:57
I always have at least two easy knitting patterns going at the same time. My original reason for this was because I wanted to do the Wavy scarf knitting pattern I described in an early post. But this scarf requires a row counter and a row diagram. I didn’t want to be bothered with carrying this stuff around with me. Plus you never know if you’ll have a convenient place to set this stuff.
So instead of even trying to work on Wavy when I’m out and about, I just started a new project. The alternate project is Read the rest of this entry »
“Wavy” is one of my favorite easy knitting patterns created by someone else. I have made it twice, both times in Caron’s Simply Soft yarn. (Six sets of 44 rows takes about 8 oz of Simply Soft. I used #8 needles.) To me, this yarn seems reminiscent of cotton embroidery floss. I love the little bit of sheen it has, along with the softness and drape. The only problem I have with this pattern is keeping track of what row I’m on. (The pattern has 44 rows that can be repeated 6 or 7 times to make the full scarf.) Which leads me to the real topic of this article: how to not lose your place when you’re easily distracted (or, in other words, when your brain is starting to turn to mush).
There is no shortage of ideas for counting rows out there. Forty years ago, my mom used the kind of row counter that slides Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Easy Knitting Patterns, Pattern Reviews |
Tags: easy knitting pattern, row counters, row counting, Scarf Knitting Pattern |
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