Egg Baskets

My daughter was looking for small baskets for the children to use for collecting eggs from their chickens. I have long wanted to try knitting and felting small bowls or baskets so thought I'd have a go at using up the left-over bits of Murano wool in an egg-basket experiment. I had three partial balls in different colours.
I checked out a few patterns to get the guist of it, then worked it out as I went along. I constructed a base that was roughly circular - began with 20 stitches on straight needles, increased one at the beginning of each row to 30 stitches, knitted 10 rows straight, then decreased one per row to 20.

I then swapped to a circular needle and picked up about 26 stitches down each side and 20 at the starting end.

Of course, I had to factor in the 'lean' of Murano. It is possible to use it to make patterns!


I knitted in the round until it was about one and a half times the height I wanted to end up with, then put two sets of 5 stitches on to stitch holders and cast-off the remaining stitches. I used the two sets of five stitches to knit I-cords which I joined to the other side as handles.


I was tempted to only do one handle, but thought the top might gape and the eggs fall out.


I then knitted up a second one, slightly smaller.



As there was still wool left over, I thought I'd keep going and experiment with even smaller ones with a single handle. After all, I might as well felt four together!


I began the smaller bases with 15 stitches, increased to 22, knit 10 rows before decreasing.


They still seemed fairly roomy inside and one handle looked as if it might be adequate. I did not need to combine my bits of Murano wool - each bag came out of a the remains of one of my balls - knitted as it came in term of colour.






At the end, however, I did manipulate my remaining scrap to get an orange edge on the final basket.








This is all the wool I had left when I finished.




Here are my four Murano egg baskets ready to be felted.

Last whole ball of Murano wool - cowl.

I had one more full ball of the Murano wool I bought at the beginning of this winter left and thought I would use it up on a cowl. I am disappointed in the distinctiveness of the stripe that results from the variegation in this wool, so thought I'd choose a pattern that uses the stripe.

In Cowlgirls, I found a pattern for a balaklava, that converts to a cowl - quite a clever design. Instead of using four different colours to achieve the stripe, I used a 200 gm ball of Murano in colour CK27 . 

This has proved to be a softer mix of colours, which blends rather than contrasts the stripes - the most attractive of the three colours I purchased.

I knitted this into the back of the stitch to prevent the skew that has developed with the other balls of this wool.

It is knitted from the top down - hat first, then a split for the face, with a cast-on section joining up the two sides to form the cowl component.

The cowl gets broader around the shoulder.

I'm pleased with the colours in this one - by far the best of the Murano colours I have tried, perhaps because the colours are so well matched in duskiness.

 I used the last of these ceramic buttons from my stash.






This works well as a cowl and converts to a hood if ever needed. It's soft and cosy and looks great.




 

Small bags in Murano wool for felting

In the weeks before going to Kangaroo Island, I thought I would have another go at knitting a bag from Murano wool, this time trying a small bag and using shade 022. I chose Ronaldsay Beach from Alison Underwood & Sue Parker's Felted Bags. The challenge and interest with this bag is a frilled top.

It knitted up quite quickly and easily.

I had my eye out for any emergency of the lean-to-the-right-hand-of the-knitter syndrome that had plagued my large Murano bag. I wondered if this was only a symptom of large projects and thought it worth giving it a try - I had bought 4 balls of this wool to play with.

Sure enough, after about 20 rows, the lean appeared. I think I can now conclude this is a problem with the wool.

I have been unable to any reference to this online but it is very hard to search for -'twist' 'lean', 'skew' and similar terms all bring up a range of standard knitting techniques.

This bag takes 100gms of wool - half the ball I have, so I decided to finish this one knitting as normal, then knit another one into the back of the stitch to see if that solves the problem.  Hopefully felting will remove the distortion.

The bag has two rows of bobbles around the top, just below the frill. I enjoyed finishing the bag in this way. The pattern is very easy, so I can keep it in my head. It's a good project to carry around, as the ball goes inside the bag!

 This time I determined where the handles went by using my eye, rather than counting rows from the marked corners - the problem I got into with the larger bag, as the distortion in the direction of the knitting leads to misalignment.

Here's the second bag - knitted using same wool, same pattern, but knitting into the back of the stitch. Perfectly straight! Many thanks to Katherine who suggested the remedy!

I am enjoying this pattern, so decided to make one bag before I started felting.