Make Do and Mend Day

Last week I picked up a beige and white spotted blouse in my local jumble sale for 10p. I’d recently completed knitting two bags which were too nice just to have as bags, so I have called them Bag Cushions. The idea is that they will live on the settee until I want them for an outing, so they needed some sort of stuffing that could be taken in and out quickly. The oblong Kilim bag was easy - I had a long piece of wadding left over from my patchwork quilt. Also, because of having the hoards of visitors last week, I had taken an older pillow out of storage and found it was awful - one of those items that’s supposed to be washable and totally changes its shape in the machine! I took this to bits and found that this was also a piece of flat wadding, wrapped round and round. I extricated it down to the good stuff, and cut two circles from it for my sunflower bag. Both these are destined to be going on holiday with us in May, as our gite in France doesn’t have any cushions on the settee. They will be stuffed with balls of wool for the flight - let’s see what the X-ray machine makes of that! For the present, the spotted blouse has provided the covers for the wadding - the back for the Kilim, the sleeves for the sunflower. It’s delightfully polyester and slippery, and must have made its previous owner sweat like nobody’s business (yes, I have washed it before cutting it up!).

I’m also knitting another Noquo (Not-quite-origami) bag from that fantastic shiny Wilko’s yarn in bronze and purple, which will be enormously stretchy and needs a woven lining. I’ve used the fronts of the blouse for this, and for a bit of fun, kept the button and buttonband on as the top edge. One edge slopped off where it has been the underarm, but the bag has cut off corners anyway - serendipity. A few minutes works with scissors and sewing machine and three challenges solved in one fell swoop.

The rest of the morning seemed to be taken up with re-assembling my Knitmaster, taken down to accommodate the visitors. It’s only been down for a week, but I ended up with two pieces of metal that I couldn’t place for ages. Eventually the grey matter got working, and the machine is up and safe. All I needed it for was to knit “shoelaces” which are actually going on socks. These are 3-stitch slipstitch or I-cord. I’d also picked up some clear beads in Southwell, so joined a couple of these to the end of each shoe lace. The socks are made on the CSM, with double eyelet holes every 10 rows down the front of the leg. The laces re purely decorative, they won’t pull the sock in for fit, but they have already given me the idea of socks with a horizontal row of eyelets to tie. Thoughts of shoelaces lead to socklaces, so how about several mini sock suspended along its length round the sock? I’ve got 84 needles to play with, mathematically this divides into factors of 2,3,4,6,7, multiples of 12x7, 14x6, 21x4, 28x3, which is a bit awkward, so I suppose I will have to go for 12 holes spaced every 7 stitches, which will give a bow tie at the front and 11 spaces to hang tiny socks, probably too many, unless I only hang a socks every other one.