Keeping Heads Warm

Hats, hats and more hats!  Great way to use up scraps of yarn! Not really needed right now but they will be come winter.  These hats are destined for the kindergarten children of the Choctaw Nation Head Start program in Oklahoma.  A friend of mine has  been collecting 310 hats each year to send to this program. Here is her blog if you want to follow the progress:  310 Hats


So far, I have made 7 hats to contribute.  Here are pictures of the first 6 hats. It has been fun to see what sort of variations I can come up with!

The knitters from our church are also making hats as well as scarves and mittens to give out this winter as part of our mitten tree project.  I will have to keep knitting so I can contribute to that one too.  Fortunately, hats are a quick project!

More Charity Knitting

I have several charity projects that I knit for.

There are

• prayer shawls for our church ministry,
  
• hats & mittens for the international families -- also part of our church ministry,
  
• hats for www.knit-a-cap.org,
• and recently I started making wool mittens for Macuwita-Sni (on Yahoo) (and here on Ravelry) a project for the Cheyenne River Sioux in South Dakota

The hat that I started on my way home from TNNA is one of these pictured. I had some made before the show and I have made others since then. These are really easy and fast to make. Some of them will go to the internationals and some will go to knit-a-cap.

The red mittens in my last post are planned for Macuwita-Sni, as are these red and blue stranded mittens. These have been a fun but frustrating exercise. I do not have a pattern to work from. I just thought I should add a simple stranded pattern to make them a little thicker and warmer. HA! The first mitten didn't work out too badly but trying to make the second one match was really a challenge! As my husband likes to remind me, "It's easy to make ONE of anything alike!"

I have ripped out many, many times! But I think I finally have it. Now to see if I can figure out what to do with the thumbs!!

Finished knitting

Some finished item pictures:

My Candy Wrapper Hat pattern done in Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride Worsted yarn. This will be a nice warm hat!
More mittens for the International students. They are 100% wool. Should feel good to someone who is not used to Iowa winters I hope.


And lastly, a child size hat. I knit this during Amy's basketball game. Remember how I said that I could knit simple things without looking at them? I was surprised at how quickly I finished it. I had it cast on before the game so I didn't have to worry about counting. I almost finished it during the game. I think I knit faster when the game gets exciting! Amy made the first basket of the game for her team! It was also the only basket made in the first half I think. It is a very inexperienced, young team. They lost 59-12 but they had a great time playing and felt good about how it went.

Four boxes of yarn have been donated recently for the knitters at church. Of course it came to my house because I am in charge of the group. We don't have a very large group at this point so I guess I better keep busy. I certainly won't run out of yarn any time soon!

Busy Summer & School has started!

Vacation is over and summer has come to an end. This past month I have been busy, busy. We babysat for 2 little girls for 3 weeks. I didn't have much time for knitting then. I was also trying to get ready for school, moving a daughter into a new apartment, making curtains for her and sewing a mother-of-the-bride outfit for a friend.

I have 3 homeschooling this year but only 1 enrolled in our homeschool assistance program through the school district. I will be teaching a Kindergarten, 9th grade and 12th grade-- mostly supervising in the case of the older ones. I have one of the two high schoolers going to band, chorus and Spanish at the local high school. That means some extra driving for me. Then there is our 5th grader who really, really wanted to go to school full time. We decided to give it a try this year and see how she does. So more driving! We are still trying to work out the timing for getting them where the need to be. Later we will be adding some music lessons and extra field trips and enrichment classes. It is making me tired just thinking about what this year will bring!

My knitting has suffered some but I can see that all of the waiting in the car for the kids may actually help. I always take a project along. My goal right now is to try to finish up some of the projects that have been on the needles a bit too long. I am trying to resist starting anything new right now so I can do that.

I am sending off a dozen hats to the Knit-a-cap project today. I have a couple of other charity packages that are going too for the Yarn Yoga group that I am a co-owner of now.

I will post some photo updates of my knitting as soon as the camera batteries are recharged!

Hug your kids today. They grow up way too fast!

Denise

Mindless knitting projects

I needed something extra for a baby gift so I started the baby bib from Mason Dixon knitting. It is one of my mindless knitting projects. Very easy garter stitch with cotton yarn.

Another mindless project is the hats I am making for Knit-a-cap and the kids at church. I vary the number of stitches, size of needles, type of yarn and even how many strands to get different sizes. I have 15 hats completed now. The top two are the same yarn with different numbers of stitches. The green one is a strand of worsted and a strand of baby yarn.

I also picked up an unfinished Baby Surprise Jacket last week and decided that I should finish it. It is a nice soft yarn from Hobby Lobby's Baby Bee line. It is a fairly heavy worsted weight and I am using a size 8 needle for this one. I think it would be large on the one year old I am babysitting this week.

I have been looking at it and wishing I had added some stripes though. It looks a little boring doesn't it? I am to the buttonhole row at this point. Maybe I can add some color with an I-cord binding and some cuffs?

What can I say?

I frogged it! I decided that I really didn't like the back side of the stockinette on this Silky Wool. The pattern has you use reverse-stockinette as the background for the cables. The yarn is rustic enough on the right side of the stockinette that I really was not liking the wrong side.

I also had really made it difficult for myself because I was knitting it in the round from the inside so I could knit all the stitches. Except that meant that I had to do all of the cable work from the back side of the top, reading the charts backwards and making all the knits into purls and the purls, knits. YIKES! It was just too much!

So off to the frog pond it went. I started over again using the front of the stockinette and adding 2 purl stitches beside the cable so it will stand out. I really like it now! I think I may leave out the design that is in the center of the top though. It is just not in a good place for my figure!


I am still knitting caps! I found some fun kid-colored yarns on sale. I don't think I will run out of yarns any time soon. I am up to cap number 10 now. The plain green one came out a little bit small for Knit-a-cap. It will probably go to the international families instead. I have more of this yarn(Red Heart Kids), so the next one is one strand of it and one strand of baby yarn on size 11 needles. I wonder what size it will come out? It really doesn't matter because there is always a child's head that it will fit!


I also did some blanket blocks and a pink ribbon dishcloth for a friend of a friend who is dealing with cancer. Some of the blocks are crochet and some are knit. I pray that these things will give her some comfort and that she will heal and live a long, full life.