Charity Begins At Knitting Guild

Thursday night in the midst of a (pain in the ass) snowstorm a few hardy souls made it to the Bay Lakes Knitting Guild meeting. There was a tantalizing heap of bags on a back table that proved to be "kits" of yarn and a pattern to knit hats, scarves, and mittens for charity. The Guild has adopted a couple elementary schools in town to help provide warm accessories for kids who don't have them. Some of the bags contained the softest yarn and patterns to knit chemo caps. I took a skein of Wool Ease Thick 'n Quick in a two-color ply of forest green and burgundy. While I'm intrigued to make the pattern clipped to the bag, I suspect that I'd have been knitting a helmet because the yarn's a bit thicker than what's called for. Happily I had another free pattern (no copyright infringement to worry about) down in my files so I got out a couple circular needles and cast on.

The other package I chose had 2 partial skeins in it, one light blue and one brown, to make a striped hat. I took the pattern for that one; it turned out to be a cabled hat. I'm slower than molasses in January at making cables so I searched the free patterns on Ravelry for a striped hat pattern I liked. Naturally I chose the Helix (sic) Striped Hat that calls for 3 colors. I thought I'd take a stab at knitting it with only two colors but if it doesn't work I thought I'd toss in this crazy green I had downstairs. I may just use the green anyway since the three of them together please me no end. (we all know I am categorically unable to follow directions as written)


I've been chugging along on the Red Marl sweater at work. I'm less than 20 rows from finishing the Fair Isle and then it'll be straight red knitting which should go faster.






My plan is to finish the second Brangelina Mitt tonight so that I can cast on the first Red Marl sweater sleeve or maybe I'll see about casting on both and knitting them together so they're the same length. My Clearing friend, Fran, was doing that a couple years ago for that very reason and I thought it was brilliant.




It's quite difficult to limit myself to only knitting 2 rows on my Maple Tree Scarf every day, but forging ahead would defeat the whole purpose. Did I show you that I found a couple partial skeins of green sock yarn to carry along in honor of the lichens on the tree? I feel very smug about it. (Thanks, Z-Dawg.)



DS just called to say that they're in MPLS waiting for their flight home and would we please come over to let Porter out to potty tomorrow afternoon? Yay, I get to play with Porter. She's a lot more fun(ner) to visit than Henny & Penny. Although I did get to goose both chickens in the tail when I went over to shut them in for the night. They were perched side by side on the doorstep of the roost and didn't move when I asked them to, so I tootsed them both in the keester, one at a time, took off the ramp and shut the door. Foolish birds.