It’s time for another fiber arts roundup. Today’s theme is pieces inspired by life with our Volkswagen.
These first two projects are some of the first items I ever crocheted, three or four years ago.
This one was a jacket to keep our percolator warm. I didn’t follow a pattern. I’d made enough hats and things at this point that I felt pretty confident creating it as I went along, using whatever scrap yarn I had at hand. I believe it’s various shades of Lion Brand Wool-Ease held with two strands together for extra bulk and the marled effect. When I started to run out of a color, I dropped it and picked something else up. I may have found the craft buttons at a local thrift store. The top is attached on one side and hinges open when unbuttoned.
I keep using the past tense with this warmer because we no longer own it. We’ve brewed coffee while traveling or camping with a percolator for years. In 2016, I went through a phase where I wasn’t drinking coffee. I changed my morning routine to chai. The problem here is we can pour a full percolator pot into two good sized thermal mugs, but we didn’t have a way to keep the pot warm if you were just pouring up one cup. And what’s the point of brewing a half pot of coffee?! We used it for about a year before I got back into my old routine and there wasn’t any coffee left to keep warm, so we gifted it to a family of fellow v-dubbers. It made me smile to see it in their kitchen at ROTR last August, looking none the worse for wear.
I think I created these after our 2016 Parks Trip b/c hubby was complaining about cold hands. I can’t find a valid link to the patterns anymore. They were free and very simple. Great for a beginner. The links I do have, currently redirect to thesprucecrafts.com I added the flap on the back of the hat per hub’s specs. This was more Lion Brand Wool-Ease. The hat has turned out to be great for covering long hair while working in the garage, a must while our beloved VW has been going through her restorative process.
Unfortunately, the wristers haven’t really been put to use. I think I’ve worn ’em more than he has and that was just once. They’re a little big for me. His hands are usually warm. He isn’t the hand-wear kind of guy, and we haven’t been on the road in those kinds of temps since. I still think they’d be great to keep the breeze from the vent window / defrost balancer off your knuckles when driving below freezing. For now, I’d look for them either in the Casita as backup or in our catchall basket of accessories by the front door, waiting for the bus to get back on the road.
All that nostalgia, to be on the road again in our bus… Which brings me to the latest projects. These were part of my holiday knitting frenzy, and since they’ve been gifted, I can talk about them now.
This one I made for hubs, it’s our bus on two sides alternating with the Wolfsburg crest on the other two sides. Running around the bottom it says Westfalia. It’s the same pattern from Andra Rangel’s book that I used to make his Bee Hat with my own custom color-work chart. The ribbing is a modified pattern from the Japanese stitch bible that reminded me of the V on the nose of a splitty. I started out doing it in two tones that I thought was gonna be really cool, ‘deluxe;’ but I ended up re-doing it and dropping the extra color-work.
The navy yarn is malabrigo sock in Cote d’azure, and the grey is Sophie de luxe by Bremont that I picked up many years ago in Silver City. It’s a blend mostly of baby alpaca with a little mulberry silk and cashmere. They are so luscious together and I love how the Sophie yarn is getting fuzzier with wear. I get a big ole grin when I see him wearing this hat or even if it’s just sitting on the dashboard of one of our other vehicles.
The fraternal twin went to our very good friend, Big Bus Mike. It’s the hat hubby really wanted for himself, based off of the pattern found on NOS part boxes and old enamel dealership signs. Although the malabrigo was a fresh new skein purchased for this hat, they really do share some DNA as I used the rest of the ball of Sophie before starting a new one.
BTW Ever think about where things come from? Bremont’s a company in Germany—the fiber’s actually from Peru, and the color-work was done on German needles—addi Natura, inspired by a German vehicle, by an artist with German—and Shetland—roots. Not to leave out the malabrigo yarn, which is a company from Uruguay. They have opened a mill in Peru so maybe these two yarns are more similar than one may think. It’s a small world after all.
WIP update: Continuing off the beaten path—this one’s got nothing to do with Volkswagens. My last knit post mentioned the poncho I’m working on. Sometimes it’s tough to admit when you’re wrong. I bought some yarns I thought would compliment the yarn I started with. In some ways it did; but the overall shade and the way the new yarn striped or had more colors going on, didn’t appeal to me as I knitted it up for this. The fancy patterns from the stitching were getting lost. I spent a lot of time arranging the squares and staring at them, and continued swatching.
Finally, I decided. Shannon was right. I needed to look for more of the original yarn. I found it online all the way in Massachusetts at Another Yarn. It’s perfect. Now my questions are a lot more fun to address, figuring out which pattern to knit up next, if I should try a new pattern, or how I want to blend all the color changes together in the overall garment.
Don’t worry about the other, unused yarn. The squares I knitted up will be used for something else. I haven’t decided if I’ll take them apart and re-use them. Probably. I think they’d look good in a color-work project with some darker contrasting solid. Maybe some mitts or a sweater? They’ll go back to the stash pile till they tell me what they want to become.