"Properly practiced, knitting soothes the troubled spirit, and it doesn't hurt the untroubled spirit either." ~ Elizabeth Zimmerman

3/8/07

Knit Wits and Toys

Went to my Knit Wits meeting yesterday. This is a knitting group that I joined last month. It meets on the first Wednesday of the month at the Coeur d'Alene Senior Center. There's about 2 dozen members. I'm not sure, but I think I'm probably the youngest one there. I'm sure enjoying it though. I've missed being in the company of other knitters since I closed the shop.

Knit Wits is a group that knits for charity. They accept yarn donations. The yarn is brought to the meeting each month. We can pick out the yarn we want, take it with us, and bring it back as a finished project for donation. We knit at the meetings. I'm working on an afghan.

I didn't know, when I started it, just exactly what they'd be wanting, so I just pulled a couple skeins of yarn out of my closet and started knitting the infamous diamond dishcloth pattern. You know the one, you start out with 4 sts, increase at the beginning of every row until you get to the right size, then decrease every row. You end up with a square, but it's been knit diagonally. Looks kind of cool.

I've not tried it as an afghan before, so I'm kind of winging it. I'm using 2 strands of worsted weight yarn and size 13 needles. I'm over halfway done now. When I got to 130 sts across I started decreasing, so there are less sts with each row. I'm using red and white acrylic yarn. I'm anxious to get it done. I don't really enjoy knitting afghans. They need knitted or crocheted toys, so I've volunteered to fill that need. I LOVE making toys.

In fact, years ago, I used to sell machine knitting patterns for toys that I'd written and published. Here are some pictures of my designs that I found hiding on my hard drive (from when I used to have a web page). The pics aren't very good. They were taken before digital cameras, and the scans of those pictures didn't turn out as good as they would now. So I apologize for the quality.

These are Curly the bear (and Curly small), Dancing Dana (that's my daughter Ruth when she was little dancing with her), A little red car, a blue pickup truck, and 3 dolls I called Precious Friends. All of these were made on a Brother standard gauge knitting machine.





























1 comment:

  1. I can't but admire your skills. You can use a knitting machine. I just couldn't. I've used to hand knitting.

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