Dress-up Your Wine Bottle

I started knitting about 10 years ago.  To be honest, I don't remember exactly why, but I asked my grandmother to show me.  She willingly gave me her supplies...needles in an old Pringles can, a handful of crochet hooks, a how-to book and some basic lessons about casting on, knitting and purling.  From there I use Google and YouTube to teach me anything I don't know or can't figure out on my own.

The past three years my creativity has grown and the scope of things I am able to create has developed.  Moving forward I hope to share with you my projects, techniques and ideas to hopefully inspire you and share my love of knitting.

Over the weekend I was out doing some shopping with my sister.  At one of the stores were wine bottles "dressed up" for winter in little knitted hats and scarves.  Immediately I was drawn to these cute accessories as they combined two things I absolutely love - wine and knitting!  While they were fairly small, I thought I would be able to recreate them on my own.

When I got home I hustled upstairs to my yarn cave to see what I had available and fortunately I found a bright red, snow white and forest green for my project.  I did a quick Google search to determine where to start.  Here's what I've come up with so far...

The one on the top right is the first one I created.  I prefer the hats on the left and bottom as they are a bit smaller and a cuter.  The scarves are each a little different - in all I cast on 8 stitches.  The one on the top left is garter stitch (knit every row) and the one on the right is knit 1, purl 1 for a ribbed look and the one on the bottom is a stockinette stitch (knit a row, purl a row).  With the hats I cast on 24 and evenly divided them across 3 double pointed needles.  The white one on the right has a couple rows of ribbing and is then knitted to the top.  The other two, the ones I prefer, are knit 2, purl 2 all the way to the top.  Once the hat is as big as you want, k2together, purl2together to reduce the stitches to 12 and then k2together for the final round to reduce to 6 stitches.  From there loop the reminding stitches together with a knitting needle to complete the hat.

For the fringes I simply wrapped thread around my fingers and then cut on one side (see images below).  From there I used a crochet hook to pull the fringe through the pieces where I wanted them and then trimmed them to the length desired.  With the hats I pulled the fringe through the top of the hat and tied it together on the inside.  On the scarves I simple pulled the two loose ends through the halved part and tightened.

I'm hoping to come up with some ideas on how to dress up the wine bottles with non-wintery looks as well because I can't get over how fun and simple this project is.  I don't know for sure how many scarves and hats can be made out of a single ball of yarn, but it has to be quite a few.  Together each set probably took me about an hour to put together.  Super fun for a day full of football watching and sure to keep my hands out of the snacks!