The last month or so I’ve had a “hobby” project I have been playing with. I actually can’t recall exactly when I started this project. I had a smallish ball of bright blue yarn that I decided would be good for practicing knitting. I’m really not all that great at knitting, though I can knit a pretty decent garter stitch scarf. I cast on 15 stitches with the idea being to knit a few rows whenever I felt I had a little time and wanted a little knitting practice.

Sometimes the project got stuck in the bottom of my project bag for weeks at a time. Then I would take it out and knit a few rows. About a month ago I decided to finally finish up the blue yarn. My tension wasn’t always great, but I made fairly quick progress towards finishing it and I began to think about what I wanted to do with it next. I knew it wasn’t going to be very long, so wouldn’t really work as a skinny scarf.

Instead I decided to use some colorful variegated yarn to pick up stitches along the length of the blue piece. I had in mind the idea of creating a cuddly garter stitch wrap for wearing when the cooler weather arrives here on my mountain. It would also give me a chance to practice decreasing in knitting.

I really like the way the picked up stitches created a ridge on the side of the blue piece that reminds me of crocheted “crab stitch” or reverse single crochet

I had a lot of fun knitting this section of the wrap. The colorful changes as each row was completed kept me quite entertained. I decided to decrease on just one edge every 4th row. After a few times of missing my decrease row I added some of my locking stitch markers to help me keep track better.

Now I’m trying to decide if I want to add more to this wrap and play with another knitting technique like short rows, or maybe I will decrease every other row to make a sharper angle? Or I could just call it finished. This has been a great practice piece so far. I am actually happier with my weaving in of tails where I added a new ball of yarn. I always feel like I ruin my knitting when I weave in my tails, so it’s nice to be happy with that aspect finally.

Now I just need to work on my skills doing the purl stitch and increasing in knitting. In the meantime there are lots of crochet designs on my work table that I am hoping to share with you the next couple of months.