We have had an air fryer for years. If you are not familiar with them an air fryer is a kitchen appliance which fries food without food without having to submerse it in oil. The food sits in a wire basket and all oil that comes out of the food get is captured into a basket below. We use ours several times a week as I can put on dinner and walk away knowing it is cooking safely. One draw back is that sometimes oil can leak from the bottom of it. Our air fryer lives on our kitchen bench due to how often I use it. When we moved I decided to make a mat for it to sit on to protect the bench top it sits on.
The outside of the air fryer doesn’t get hot but I still wanted a material that was heat resistant as after all it is an electrical appliance. I raided my stash for a couple of balls of wool. The yarn I used I know is machine washable so I can toss the mat into the washing machine when it got dirty. I decided I would use the technique of double knitting so it would have the thickness to protect the bench plus I like double knitting and it was an excuse to do it. The yarn I used was 8ply so with the 2 layers it was like 16ply in thickness. You can get really creative with double knitting and do patterns but I kept it simple and just had one colour on the front and one colour on the back.
Believe it or not but there are no air fryer mat patterns on Ravelry! It seems no one else has been that crazy to knit one so I had to just make up a pattern. Double knitting is worked in pairs of stitches that you count as one stitch. It can be a little confusing but you knit the first coloured yarn and purl the second colour for every stitch you do. I consider Sockmatician the guru of double knitting. He has a YouTube clip showing how to cast on the stitches in alternative colours so that the cast on looks clean and seamless. For this using 4mm needles on a long cable I cast on 50 pairs of stitches (50 in the blue and 50 in the pink) I love how the ends look. I didn’t take a photo of the sides but I followed another of Sockmatician’s tutorials and did a slip stitch edge. By slipping the last pair of stitches per row in the way demonstrated in the clip the edges looked neater with the colours staying consistent. I just knitted the mat until it looked long enough. To cast off I did kitchener graft. It took a while but the end result was worth it. It has also gave me practice doing the graft as I need all the practice I can with it.
I’m currently knitting a second mat so we can have one in use and one in the wash. Once it is finished I’ll take photos of the sides to show the slip stitch edge and show you what happens if you don’t twist the yarns when you are doing the slip stitch.
Cassiy
stitchnsewcreates 