A Few F.O.'s by My Students

The snake is actually a finished object from last year's knitting club. It is by a 3rd grader who has continued this year. Her mother comes and helps us almost every week. She helped her daughter with this project only by encouraging her. The whole thing was knit by the child. I don't know about the sewing-up. Pretty impressive for an 8-year old. I'd say its about a meter long. There are increases all along the body. The head includes both increases and decreases.


This wristwarmer in classic girl colors was knitted by a newcomer to knitting club this year, a 4th grader. She is working on a second one. This child does NOT have second-of-the-pair syndrome.


The pieces that follow are also by a 4th grader in this year's club. He learned the knit stitch in one session. He next knit a neck warmer in the round on 16-inch circs. It would have been a hat, but I let him get the knitting twisted when joining. I felt terrible, but he said he liked it as a neck warmer. A polite child. He learned to cast on and off on the neck warmer. So this week he shows me the pieces in the 1st picture below. They match perfectly when stacked one on top of the other. The counts must be identical, but also the stitch gauge and row gauge. This is something I haven't achieved in my own knitting. He wasn't taught how to decrease. He bound off one stitch at the beginning of rows to get the slanted edge. Kinda mind-blowing, especially when I read about people being nervous to try a new technique like circular knitting or like how I am about colorwork. There's more. Look at the next picture.


Look carefully. Two yarns are coming out of the top. Yes indeed. Mosaic knitting or slip stitches or something. "I knitted two colors at once" he says simply. That's when I went for the camera. (I apologize for the fuzzy picture.) The red is a solid, the rest is the same variegated yarn as the two matching pieces. This is so cool.
Here's what's funny. The kids seem to think that anything that's been bound off is a Finished Object whether its function is known or not. Some of them put their heads together when the boy didn't know what the two matching pieces were yet. My favorite suggestion was to sew them together to make a cat saddle. They are just the right size.