The May 1968 issue of Stitchcraft had a lot of cute projects: the striped sweater set on the cover, a couple of nice little “shell” sleeveless tops, a baby cardigan, a jumper with an interesting lattice yoke… but alas, I was so busy with real life in 2026 this month, and had so many unfinished projects lying around anyway, that it would have been foolish to try and start (much less finish) an entire normal knitting project. Luckily, there were some cute and easy embroidery projects, and I had a friend visiting whose hot-water bottle was crying out for a knitted cover, so I adapted one of the embroidered cushion designs into a simple motif for a knitted cosy.
I had bought two skeins of bright and fluffy Natural Lama Chunky by Lana Grossa in hot pink some time ago, probably because they were on sale and displayed on that little rolling shelf which my local wool shop so cleverly rolls outside onto the sidewalk in good weather. It is delightfully soft and squishy and can be knit into pretty much whatever tension you want, as the fibres compress or fluff up to fit the space allotted to them.
I used 5 mm needles and just cast on a number of stitches that seemed good, and worked in the round up to the neck part of the bottle. At that point, I realised that it would be much better to do the embroidery before the knitted bag part was completed, since I was going to use ribbing to pull the fabric in at the neck and it would be easier to access the embroidered part while the knitting was shorter and wider.
The embroidery pattern was the oddly-titled “Daisy Heads”, featured together with “Corn Cobs”, the other cushion embroidery project from May 1968. (I really loved the corn-cob pattern, which looked like a fine-line cartoon drawing, but it would have been very difficult to do without the original transfer and certainly not on a knitted bag). Besides looking nothing at all like actual daisies (orange petals with brown centres?), the petals were designed for fine long-and-short stitch on a cushion, with stem-stitch white outlines and French-knot centres, which is all perfectly fine with embroidery wool on a cushion, but equally impractical on a bulky knitted bag. I substituted normal DK knitting wool in white and yellow (somewhat more daisy-accurate) and made the petals in satin stitch, or as close as I could get to long-and-short stitch. The stem-stitch outlines were on a little larger scale, but nice enough, and the French knot centres were fine in in yellow instead of brown. I did have some brown wool that I thought I would use for the very center, but the plain yellow and white on bright pink looked better.
For the top part of the bottle where the cap screws in, I kept the same amount of stitches and just worked them in 1×1 ribbing, with a row of eyelets to thread a cord through to pull it in more if desired. The cord was monk’s cord, made the simple way by tying the strands to a door handle and twisting.
That was all! It was more “inspired by Stitchcraft” than a real re-creation of the pattern, but that’s OK. I destashed some yarn, made a useful object and made my friend happy. What more could a person want? I hope to get some WIPs finished in June and have an extra project or two to write about then.
The Stitchcraft Sixties 