Monday, August 22, 2011

Ravelry, the Cubs and Puppy Cam

What do these three things have in common?  My time on the internet.

Today I updated some project notes on Ravelry and hunted down a pattern for a baby hat that a friend had shown me.  I need to knit a soft and pink hat for friends' granddaughter.  She was just diagnosed with a neuroblastoma tumor.  I've also been knitting purple baby hats for Click for Babies, an organization which is striving to raise awareness of spread prevention of Shaken Baby Syndrome. 
I've been thinking about why we knitters whip out our yarn and needles for those we've never met.  But it is nothing new.  In No Idle Hands: A Social History of Knitting in America she documents all the generations which have knit grey socks and blanket squares for soldiers, blankets for eldery and infirm, hats for babies, etc.  We've been doing it since before we were a country. Knitter's have been bringing knitting into the public forum a lot lately, but it's nothing new.  There were large, public knit-ins during WW1.  Several of my mom's friends commented about sweaters or argyle socks which they had knit during college lectures when they found out I was knitting (much less common for a college student in the eighties than the fifties or the 21st century.)

The start of our collection at the shop.  They will be picked up in October and delivered to Iowa babies born in November.


Tonight I was also following the Cubs and Braves on Gameday since they weren't televised.  Sigh, lots of hits but no runs.  My baseball fandom started with the Rockies in their innaugural season and I still love to watch them whenever possible, but in eastern Iowa I've become one of the Cub's faithful, hopeful and too frequently dissapointed.  Oh well, there's always next year.

And Puppy Cam.  I belong to a Yahoo group called Labsr4u.  One of the members is a breeder who has two litters under a month old with live "puppy cam" http://forgelabs.weebly.com/video-gallery.html.  Right now they are "bellying up to the bar".  Can you get enough lab puppy cuteness? Not me, and I can watch them as I knit.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Cast on - Cast off

Elizabeth Zimmermann to the rescue.  I was finishing a project last night, but I just didn't like the way the bind-off was looking.  I remembered reading about EZ's cast-on/cast-off years ago.  Out came The Knitting Workshop.  It took a while for my fingers to get used to the idea but I am liking the results.

Here it is:  Caireen from Susanna IC, found  Knitty's Deep Fall 2010 issue.  This was a lovely pattern to work especially with the 2 ply alpaca I used.  His name is Sawyer from Savannah Breeze Alpacas near Vinton, IA.

Close up of the process.  It doesn't show real well, but you work with a blunt needle to copy the look of a cast-on edge