Tea towels, for actual tea

I've again become sidetracked with knitting; this time it's to replace my sorry old kitchen towels. In ready-mades I was looking for something really specific, so unsurprisingly, it doesn't seem to exist: medium to dark colours; busy patterns without too much white in them; and thick fabric—the last seems pretty hard to find these days, at any price. One of my main uses for these is mopping up tea or colorful ingredients, but a lot of what I could find was thin, solid-coloured pastels that would get very noticeably stained on first use. I guess you could bleach them, but then you never quite know what color might result.

Well, two balls of Bernat Handicrafter will make a decent-sized towel for less than $3, when it's on sale. I got many different colors in an attempt to tie together all the miscellaneous colors in my kitchen; if I don't make myself thoroughly sick of this I could end up with 12 towels, which should pretty well replace what I've got. Here's one in Indigo and Lime Stripes.

It's a Purl Soho pattern that I downscaled, in both senses; you're meant to use Euroflax linen, which is lovely, but will make a thinner towel at a significantly higher price. It seems to me that linen yarn is less absorbent, somehow, too—is it the smoother surface, or just the fact that it's never spun as thick? Most importantly, they'd take a lot longer to knit as intended. Maybe someday.

Cat tunnel

The idea here was to copy this ready-made cat tunnel, but in a sturdier fabric and colors that match the room better.

The original tunnel is a tube about 33" in circumference and 27 1/2" in length. I cut a rectangle of my base fabric for this size plus seam allowances, then pinned it around the existing tunnel and chalk-marked the placement of the wire casing that spirals around.

It got a little more complicated when I decided to add leaf appliques. At first I was thinking of doing catnip leaves, until I looked up what those are shaped like... nope, way too many little serrations. I decided on matatabi/silver vine instead—a simple heart-ish shape is a decent approximation, and my iridescent fabric at least hints at the silvery leaves. (Well, I gather that it really should be cross-dyed green and white, not green and purple, but when I get to tell fabric manufacturers what colors they should make, that'll be the day.)

I drew a template and cut out 20 of those, made up a placement, and satin-stitched on all the ones that could be attached with the base fabric still flat. For that I used some variegated green-and-white thread that was just sitting around being useless in my stash. Then I sewed up the tube (using a French seam, like the original) and finally added the last few leaves that needed to go over that seam. 

For the spiral wire casing I used a bias strip of the contrast fabric, and for the end casings I used strips of the base fabric on the straight grain. There are also three tubing ties made of the contrast fabric around one edge, so the tunnel can be collapsed and tied flat, and another piece of tubing on the opposite end that holds a jingly bell toy (on the original tunnel it's a piece of red braid). Those are each caught into the end wire casings.

Lastly, the tunnel needs a wire inserted into the spiral and end casings. I had a hard time getting a good springy wire; the best I was able to find was 14 gauge galvanized wire that doesn't have enough bounce to keep the tunnel straight. I'm guessing what I need might be spring steel, but given the size of the rolls I'm finding, plus the fact that I don't know for sure it is what I want, it might end up being cheaper just to buy more of these cat tunnel(s) to take their wires. (I'd thought I might have to cannibalize the original tunnel for its wire connectors anyway, but I'm hesitating to do that now that I've mended it—it doesn't have those falling-off casings and sticking-out wires anymore.)

Anyway, the new tunnel has been getting some cat approval even in its current sad-sack state, so I might leave both tunnels alone for the time being.