Summer Giveaway: Vegan Knitted Wraps

What do you say--better late than never? Finally, the summer giveaway is happening.

(The giveaway rules are at the end of the post. As usual, the more you help spread the word, the more entries you get in the drawing.)

This year the annual summer giveaway features the first two of a series of wraps I made last month with the assistance of a trusty knitting machine. The knitting machine can be meditative and stress reducing only after you spend countless stressful hours learning how to use it. Underscore the word countless! Thankfully I took those classes last winter. They really helped.

This first wrap is knit from a 100% acrylic bouclé thread. It was a straightforward project which only required hand manipulation in creating the long columns of dropped stitches.

Since each column of stitches is formed by a different latch hook, you can go across a row and release the stitches from your selected hooks and then tug on the fabric to drop the stitches in that column. You want to do this every 10-20 rows to make it easier to unravel the column.

This wrap is six feet long and 16 inches wide. It is light and breezy. Perfect for a late summer or early autumn evening.

The next wrap in the giveaway was my second project in the series. Having previously hand knit a fine silk bouclé Clapotis and having spent an ungodly number of hours at it, I was wondering if I could make a passably similar item on the machine in less time.

This is the result:

This is a bias-knit dropped stitch wrap created out of a loose 3-ply 100% rayon yarn. It has crêpe texture and beautiful drape. It is 70 inches long and 13 inches wide. It works well both as a wrap and as an oversized scarf.

This yummy wrap took more hand manipulation on the machine because it required you to not only drop stitches, but also to increase and/or decrease on each edge every other row. (EOR in machine knitting parlance.)

A difference between this item and a hand-knit Clapotis is that in the original design by Kate Gilbert, you twist the knit stitches on either side of the dropped stitch. This helps keep the stitches on either side of the drop column from migrating into the drop space. One would never ever twist all those stitches by hand on the machine because it would defeat the whole purpose of making it in this time-saving way.

I was able to make this in 7-8 hours--a 90% savings of invested time, so the heck with those twisted stitches. Oh, and I blocked it, which I might not have done with wool, but the rayon cried for it.

One of these vegan wraps could be yours if you:

• Leave a comment below. Be sure to say which of the two items is your favorite in case your name is drawn first. If your name is drawn second, you might receive the other one.
• Tell me in your comment that you are a blog follower for a second entry in the drawing.
• Tweet about the giveaway, post about it on Facebook, or do a blog post about it and link back to this post and tell me in the comments for additional entries.

I'll draw the winning entries on Labor Day. Good luck!