Selfish knits

Every knitter has at least one story about lovingly knitting an item for a person who then did not appreciate the item. When a person is revealed to be not knitworthy, it is all we can do to keep from shouting in our best Soup Nazi voice: "No knits for you!" While we all have many people in our lives who are knitworthy, the one person I know who will always appreciate what I knit is me, and knitting for ourselves is known as selfish knitting.

The last four projects I have completed have all selfishly been for me. The first was the scarflet I finished in September - see Wrapping Up. The second item was a quick little ballband dishcloth that I had seen in my friend Geri's copy of Mason-Dixon Knitting. I already had cotton yarn in my stash so when we got home from our visit, I knit up a Halloween-inspired dishcloth:

The third item to be completed was a Sunday Market Shawl, which I knit out of Malabrigo:

The colorway is Roanoke and it is a lovely, rich chestnut brown. I wanted a quick, mindless project to get me back into the knitting groove and this shawl kind of did the trick. Because the majority of the pattern is simple stockinette, it is perfect for watching college football games. The openwork of the shawl is achieved by intentionally dropping a stitch on the last row, and then "running" the dropped stitch. While an unintentionally dropped stitch always runs quickly, it was actually a time-consuming and laborious task to run all the rows in this shawl.

As for it being a shawl…it would have blocked wider had I used a stretchier bind off, but it would not have blocked longer. If I ever want to knit this pattern again and actually use it for a shawl, I would cast one more stitches, use more yarn and find the stretchiest possible bind off. In the meantime, it is a pretty scarf.

The last project was my first pair of fingerless mitts. For someone like me whose hands rarely get cold and just need some protection from the wind, fingerless mitts are perfect:

I used the Sirdar Escape yarn that I purchased at Soper Creek Yarn while visiting Geri over Thanksgiving weekend. It is a wool and acrylic blend, so it is easy care and will wear well. Although I was concerned with making the thumb and thumb gusset, they turned out fine. The yarn is variegated so the mitts do not "match" each other but that is okay with me, since I am not a matchy-matchy kind of person.

My streak of selfish knitting is now at an end as I turn my attention to holiday knits.