Fig. 25.
This is known as rat-tail knitting, or cork or bobbin work. It can be made either by boring a hole in a large flat cork and setting seven or eight pins in round this hole, or by setting the pins into a reel with a large hole, but I have found the best thing is to get a small tube of cardboard such as paper is rolled on (out of a toilet roll, for instance), and to stick the pins firmly into the cardboard, as in Figure 25. Five or six pins will do. Take colored wool and loop it once round each pin, then wrap it very loosely once round the whole circle of pins, and, with another large pin or a small crochet hook, lift each loop up and over the last wrap of the thread, and over the head of the pin. Do this right round the circle of pins, so that you have now a second series of loops made from the thread which was wrapped round above the first ones, while the first loops have begun to descend into the tube. Work round and round till the end of your knitted rat-tail appears out of the tube at the lower end. You can knot on lengths of wool of other colors and make very pretty reins with them. You can, if you like, work with two differently colored threads, all the time using one color for the loops you lift, over a wrap thread of another color, alternating as you work round and round your circle. This is really just the way a knitting-machine works, very much simplified. You can do the same on a larger scale with a wooden ring into which pegs of wood are inserted, and this will make quite a large woollen muffler.
A PEEP-SHOW PICTURE
Materials Required:—
A small piece of glass from an old photograph-frame, some firm brown or colored paper, any tiny flowers, leaves, etc., a piece of stamp paper.
Fig. 26.
Collect a tiny bunch of the smallest flowers you can find, daisies, buttercups, violets, even little weeds like chickweed, and small grasses, clover leaves, or sprays of moss; tie them very loosely in a little bunch. Now lay your piece of glass down on your paper (the paper may be any color, but the blue sugar-bag paper looks very pretty.) Take your little bunch of flowers and arrange it flat on the glass, with the faces of the flowers pressed against the glass, and the leaves and moss pressed flat on top of them. Put the prettiest side of them next the glass. When all the surface of the glass is fairly well covered fold the paper over the flowers so that it makes a neat parcel, and fasten down the corners of the parcel with stamp paper. Then turn your parcel over, and round three sides, about half an inch from the edge, cut a neat line, so that the paper will now lift like a flap and show your very pretty picture. Seaweeds can be used instead of flowers—and if so, they should be arranged on the glass in a dish of water and floated into place.