Cactus Pincushion and more knitting 'woes'

 

This grumpy spiky little pot cactus is my first attempt to make a pincushion. 

In a vain effort to make my work neater, I realised that I need some long bobble-headed pins to pin various crochet elements into place before sewing, and needed somewhere a bit more accessible to keep my pins than 'rattling around in the bottom of a paper envelope' so the cactus was born. 

I used this pattern: http://gurmanfravor.blogspot.com/2009/09/no-sew-amigurumi-crochet.html

...but made a couple of changes to it to give a more sturdy cactus / base. 

1) The 'head' has a disk of felt just under the top which is better to stick pins into than soft wadding used for stuffing. Pins stay put when stuck into the felt. 

2) The base is a glass stopper from a Douwe Egberts coffee jar. It is heavy, and the perfect circumference to make the base of the pot. I just crocheted in the round to the right size, then gradually worked half double crochet stitches and single crochet stitches down the sides of it to make the sides of the plant pot, before using decreases on the bottom to seal it all in nicely. The bonus is that it's heavy enough to stay put when you stick pins in it / pull them out again. 

I ended up having to crochet a rim to the pot and sew it on but other than that it was pretty much a no-sew pattern and holds all my stitch markers and pins nicely. Hooray! Successful projects are few and far between so I was very pleased with this. 

On the flip side of the coin in Knitting world, I've still been making scratty little swatches of Knit / Purl stitch to refine the technique. The muscle memory of knitting is definitely getting there, and I can now switch between knit and purl stitch to make those nice ribbed alternative rows that you see on just about all knitted work. 

I picked up some bamboo needles and these make it easier for me, purely because they're a bit more 'grippy' than the ones I borrowed off my mother in law, which means I don't drop stitches quite as often. 

As you can see from the photo I was also experimenting with changing colours mid-knit and this is WAY easier (yet quite similar) to changing colours in crochet. 

But I got cocky, I started looking at actual patterns to make something 'proper' rather than making squares, and when the instructions said...

"Perfect for a beginner. Step 1, you will be using four needles for this pattern" I basically went "WHAT THE ACTUAL F...." before deciding that I'm a way off actually making anything worthwhite yet. I have some patterns (again from my mother in law) that I might work on as these look more suitable for a beginner but researching 'knitting in the round' and realising that I might need a set of these weird looking things...

...was again a "What the eff" moment. All I wanted to make was a pair of socks!