T-Shirt Upcycling

Currently I love watching DIY videos on YouTube - especially sewing tutorials and even more especially tutorials where people use thrifted materials to create something new and stylish. Currently, my favorite channels are:

• Annika Victoria: Great sewing tutorials - and I really love her show "Make Thrift Buy"
• Coolirpa and her show "Thrifted Transformations"
• and Pinkchocolatebreak

They all have wonderful ways of creating their own patterns from clothes they already own and a great way of explaining the mechanics of sewing.

That's why I wanted to do something similar - however, with a knitting spin. I decided to use a t-shirt that had holes in the front part (just below the neckline) and "cover" these holes with a knitted collar. Here's how the piece looks in progess ... if it works out the way I want, I guess I will write a tutorial.

Wanderlust Phone Sock

My mobile needed a new sock - so I knitted one with cotton leftovers from a sweater project. It's a quick and easy knit - interesting if you want to learn new techniques like Judy's Magic Cast-On or grafting garter stitch. 

This work by Knitting and so on is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Materials

• some leftover yarn in two colors (I used less than 15 grams of aran weight cotton yarn - to be specific, it was Linea Pura Organico by Lana Grossa)
• 4mm circular needles (the yarn called for 5mm to 5.5mm needles but I wanted a denser texture)
• a tapestry needle for grafting and to weave in ends

Special Techniques

• Judy's Magic Cast-On is a technique that gives you live stitches on both sides of your needle - it is generally used for toe-up socks (e.g. in this pattern), but it can be used for other purposes as well. Here's a written description (from Knitty) and here's a YouTube-video by Cat Bordhi and another YouTube-video by Very Pink Knits.
• Grafting Garter Stitch: Shown in this YouTube video by New Stitch a Day. If you want to know all about grafting, please read the brilliant "Grafting Myths" series on Joni Coniglio's blog on knittingdaily.com.

Size and Gauge
Unstretched my phone sock is about 7 cm wide and 10.5 cm high. My gauge was 9 stitches for 5 cm and 18 rows for 5 cm.
I made my sock intentionally smaller than my phone because cotton fabric usually stretches and widens.

Instructions

Magic CO 2x24 stitches (i.e. you have 24 stitches on each needle)

Now turn your needles around in a way that you're looking at the garter stitch bump and that you could start knitting.
The rows will be knitted in a U-shape - as shown in the picture on the right. The arrow indicates the knitting direction in all RS rows.

Row 1: ktbl24, k24
Rows 2-6: k all in color 1
Rows 7-8: k all in color 2
Rows 9-10: k all in color 1
Rows 11-12: k all in color 2
Rows 13-14: k all in color 1
Rows 15-16: k all in color 2

Rows 17-18: k all in color 1

Rows 19-24: k all in color 2

Row 25: k24 in color 2, then cut yarn but leave a tail of about 50 cm

Graft in garter stitch.