Gotta Love Sunflowers...

For some reason I started off this week kind of 'meh' about doing anything with yarn.  Until Saturday, all I had managed to make were a couple of dishcloths (later in this post), but yesterday, a rainy Saturday, I was on you tube - not sure now what I was looking for, but I stumbled across a video tutorial for a Sunflower Hotpad.  I immediately thought it would be a great addition to my new potholder/hotpad collection.   So I went through my stash of yarn and found some workable cotton.  A couple of hours later this is what I had come up with:

I love it!   If I find some orange-y yellow cotton, I may just have to get it and make another one, but for now, this one makes me happy.  I added an extra row of yellow, and because of that it took most of a skein, but the brown and green were just scraps.  And the pattern is so easy.  Looking at the finished pictures in the tutorial I would never have guessed how easy it is.  There is no written pattern, or link searchable on Ravelry, but here is my project page - on the chance that anyone would benefit from the details I've put there.

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Back to the dishcloth knitting, though...   Somewhere around Tuesday I started noodling around with the knitting needles again and in a couple of days I had finished another simple dishcloth.

I feel like this is my best knitting so far.   Of course, all those speckles help hide some unevenness, but I'll take it.  The progress I feel I've gained, that is   :)

And when that one was done I started another Seeded Stripe dishcloth:

Now, my looser stitches don't show so much on this cloth (because there's so much going on), but this cloth gave me a great opportunity to really see how my stitches went from mostly nice and even (the garter stitch stripes) to all loosey goosey (the seed stitch stripes).  You can't see the loosey goosey stitches in the picture (and even in person it doesn't look bad finished), but I knew I was having some problems.   And somehow, even though I could see my stitches loosening up as I was knitting, I had no idea why it was happening.  Googling what causes uneven tension led me to some helpful sites (the most helpful being aknitka.com) that explained to me that my tension problem is probably due to purling looser than I knit.  I practiced some more and sure enough - that was my problem.  The seed stitch rows gave plenty of opportunity to pay attention to tension while switching back and forth between knitting and purling.   I haven't yet achieved correct tension while purling, but knowing what the problem is is a huge help.  Assuming I can conquer this, I feel like this knowledge will move me much further along in my knitting ability and what I may even want to try to make.

I hope it doesn't sound lame, though, to be fairly content just knitting dishcloths for the time being.  I see beautiful shawls, socks and hats and think I should be wanting to make those things, but I'm not overly drawn to try to knit them.  Knitting a dishcloth is about as relaxing and "instant gratification" as it can get for me while still working on basic stuff like tension, and eventually new stitches. And I love using my new knitted dishcloths.  I have some crocheted cloths that I like, but I'm pretty picky about my dishcloths.  They can't be too holey and they can't be too stiff or thick. Finding that perfect combination in a crocheted cloth is tricky.  But a knitted cloth, I'm thinking, pretty much always fits both of those criteria.  So for now I'm just a happy dishcloth knitter.  :^)

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To see what other Yoppers are up to, visit our thread this week on Ravelry.