The Woman Who Loved Cat's Baskets

As promised, photographs of my moebius baskets, knit from patterns in Cat Bordhi's Second Treasury of Magical Knitting (I didn't follow the patterns religiously, though -- that's half the fun of felted baskets).

The first basket I knit was a larger version of the one Cat taught us in class. I used Malabrigo's new super-bulky thick-and-thin yarn (available here on the Yarnzilla website) on US 15 needles in the color "Hongos":


It turned out beautifully -- far more beautifully than the picture would indicate, in fact, since it got all folded up and squashed on the return trip home from Meg Swansen's knitting camp in July (more on that to come, you better believe!).

I loved the playfulness of the fringe on another pattern in Cat's book, so I once again grabbed some Malabrigo thick-and-thin (this time in a color called "Canellones," found here on the Yarnzilla site) and my trusty super-long US 15s. Just for fun, I added some railroad yarn I had hanging around (in this case it was "Noch Eros" by Plymouth -- don't we all have some skeins of Eros still left in our stash, begging to be added to felted baskets?), and this is the result:

There is something rather squash-y and perhaps even buttocks-like about this basket (my fault, not Cat's -- the basket in her book is quite round and perfect), but I still think it's super-cute, and it holds an amazing amount of yarn.

A quick note on needles -- normally I consider Addis the ne plus ultra, but when it comes to moebius knitting, it's Denise needles all the way. Somehow they conform way better to the contortions of the moebius cast-on, and here's a tip that Cat gave us in class that makes an amazing difference: Use the "correct" needle size for the right-hand needle tip (in my case, US 15), but use a smaller tip on the left-hand needle (like a US 13 or 11), and the stitches will slide and glide with amazing ease. I knit both my baskets following this recommendation, and the stitches were much, much easier to move and manipulate than they would've been had both needle tips been the same size.