Needful Knitting

You know I love to knit by now. I had originally thought I would knit in the winter and do other things the rest of the year. Well, not so much. I seem to be knitting year-round now. And it makes me happy.

What I Knit

I try to spend some of my time knitting for charity or other “causes”. So far, I have knit 22 Chemo Caps. I knit them with others at the Pridie Collection Boutique Yarn Shop in Peterborough, and together we contributed 170 Chemo Caps to the Canadian Cancer Society this year. This is the bag that was presented in November (I think I see a few of mine in there):

My friend, Jocelyn, even asked me if she could have one of mine for a neighbour who was recently diagnosed. She chose the beige and rust striped (one of my favourites) from these four (I used patterns I have already knit). Her neighbour liked it. That brought even closer to home how important it is to make something that might comfort someone:

My second “round” of needful knitting started with a retweet from my friend Susan. This is what she sent me: “Dear twitter-knitters. Looking for new knitted baby blankets to donate to hospital for infant loss.”. I didn’t know exactly what was needed or if I could do this. It seemed so sad to make baby blankets for the parents who lost their babies in childbirth or shortly after. My Instructions were to make whatever I thought was right. I read that “the sizes that work fairly well are a 12x12 (yes, that small) and then a 16x16 and 26x26 (inches)”. This reference to “small” made it even more difficult. But I needed to put aside MY discomfort for someone else’s comfort, and I finally made three little blankets:

The top blanket is a Basket Weave Blanket, the middle an adaptation of a Knitted Start Cloth, and the bottom, a variation on a Knit and Purl Hearts Cloth. That was tough to do. But when I delivered my blankets to Shelley Hermer, the Social Worker at the Peterborough Regional Health Centre who sent the original tweet, and she hugged me and told me how important this was, all my own sorrows melted away, and I knew I had found the place for more needful knitting. Shelley even gave me my first #ff on Twitter (for “Follow Friday”, kind of a shout out to someone who does something “good”). This turned out to be one of the best things I have done, and I have more yarn ready for more blankets.

What I read

These projects were done in the spring and summer, so I wasn’t reading at the same time. But we were away on spring and summer RV Trips, and I did read on the road: “The Typewriter Girl” by Alison Atlee, “The Light Between Oceans (amazing) by M.L. Stedman, “A Dark and Lonely Place” by Edna Buchanan, “It Happened at the Fair” by Deeanne Gist, and “The House of Tyneford” by Natasha Solomons. This vast array included Downtown Abbey-era stories since I also watched the first four seasons over this time!