Potato Chip Knitting - Great Gifts I Make Over and Over

You know what I mean, it’s the can’t-make-just-one kind of patterns.

Recently, I’ve been on a Musselburgh binge, the results of which are in the photo. I made two last winter and have been using it with self-striping fingering and sport-weight yarns to make fun hats. There’s something great about having a few inches of mindless circular stockinette around for waiting in lines or watching a movie. (Although I used up a lot of stash yarn to do this, my favorite one, on the right, was out of self-striping yarn - so fun to watch the colors change!)

I’m captivated by the symmetry of the increases and decreases at either end of the hat, which is why I think it’s very entertaining to me to crank out these hats in my in-between moments.

But when I finish this next Musselburgh, I’m returning to another old favorite - the pumpkin baby hat.
It’s my go-to baby gift knit, one that packs maximum cuteness into relatively minimal effort.  I use this Ann Norling pattern and worsted weight yarn. My favorite orange is Rios Glazed Carrot, so I’ll be using a half ball of that, plus some dark green (Rios Fresco y Seco) for the stem. I’ve made this hat in red or purple or blue or yellow, depending on the season and the fruit I want to emulate. A quick Ravelry search turns up bulky versions for an even faster gift, or crochet versions - turns out babies look cute with pumpkins on their heads. 

I discovered the remnants of my last knitting marathon recently, folded and stacked in the linen closet. Around the end of March 2020, while we were all trying to stay indoors and buy groceries online, I knit a lot of dishcloths. A. Lot. I also binged a lot of English murder mystery shows, but that’s another blog post. My job had evaporated and I was feeling directionless, so I took a bunch of cheap dishcloth cotton and I knit up every last stinking yard of it into two-color dishcloths. Then I used them to wash dishes and wipe down the table because good grief, were we making a mess in the kitchen every single day.

Once I ran out of yarn, I bought some more, but by then it was April and I had lost the urge to knit washrags because I had finished worrying and staring at Netflix and started worrying about online middle school and online choir and online everything else. 

I felt all right putting the dishcloth pattern away for a while. The yarn had done its work, and kept me feeling productive when I wasn't sure what was going to happen, which is one of my favorite things about knitting. Knitting my feelings, I guess you call it?

Do you repeat projects? Why or why not? 


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