Breast Cancer Awareness Illusion Knit Cloth

I may not have blogged at all last month but I didn’t forget that October was Breast Cancer Awareness month. Michael’s was rather fortuitously practically giving away pink Sugar n’ Cream for a dollar a roll, so I snatched some up and decided that I really wanted to do a pink ribbon project in honor of two family friends who are breast cancer survivors. They’ve also shown appreciation for my knitting in the past, so I wanted to make them a small token to show I was thinking about them.

I should tell you at this point that I also scored some blue and cream S n’ C earlier this summer, and I have been playing around with swatches of the stuff ever since. I fully admit that I’m at a bit of a loss as to what I should do with it. I had a project in mind when I bought, but after working with the yarn, it just don’t feel quite right for what I had imagined. I gotta be honest, I’ve never even been remotely tempted to venture into dishcloth or to be more posh, “spa cloth” territory despite my dalliance with the tea towel. Now that I was also faced with the concrete subject of a pink ribbon I realized that I had perhaps narrowed my options for projects a bit too quickly. I mean what do people use worsted-weight cotton for … except dish and bath cloths. Yes I know there are plenty of other perfectly good options, but really S n’ C practically screams DISHCLOTH!!! And really, who was I to be so arrogant to ignore such a loud and obvious voice. A cloth it wanted to be, a cloth it was to be.

A bit of spice of course was going to be necessary. I had to make at least 4 or these so they couldn’t bore me to distraction. I’d been meaning to try illusion knitting for a while now and this seemed like an ideal project. Nice and small, easy to get my feet wet. As it turned out , I didn’t realize how glad I would be that I didn’t pick something bigger. Not that this was a hard project, but making illusion charts is kind of a pain in the tuchas. I’m really glad I was only plotting out a ribbon to start with, as opposed to say, the more elaborate dragon I had scribbled down in my idea notebook. Oi. Plus, I had the bright idea to knit the cloth on the bias which meant I needed to use stitch markers to keep my place in the pattern, as the diagonal of the cloth cut off the corners of my graph. No I can’t jst keep things simple. What would be the fun in that?

I am happy with the end result.

After the first cloth, which is a solid ribbon I tweaked the graph to have one of the ribbon legs overlap. The knitting also became much quicker by the third one, because I knew the chart. In general though I was a bit surprised to find that illusion knitting isn’t exactly mindless knitting. You do need to pay attention to the chart.

The ladies haven’t seen their cloths yet. I do hope they like them. I only have pictures of the first three at the moment. More pictures are/will be available in my Ravelry notebook.