Their cold hands, your warm heart

Can you help us out? We need some more mittnz. Warm hand coverings. Hand made or purchased. Brand new or gently used. Please read this article. These are the people I knit for, the Native Americans in central South Dakota, the Cheyenne River Reservation. Can you please help a little? Every item helps. If you don't like to make mittens, hats, scarves, socks, sweaters, slippers, blankets....anything will help. Let me know when you are ready to ship and I'll send you the mailing address. Please...winter is almost upon the Great Plains. It's in the mid-40s to mid-50s there at night already. In a few short weeks, it'll start getting cold. And by January the wind chill will make it dangerous.

Where the Wild Things Are. October 16.

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I have at least one student for my Baby Surprise Jacket class starting on Wednesday, so I thought I should get moving on starting a sample for the class. I'll knit it as far as the first lesson goes so the student gets an idea of what it looks like. I figure if I stay one step ahead, I'll be okay! With that said, my One Day Beret has been put on hold till I finish up this weeks work on the BSJ.

Spent yesterday afternoon at Borders knitting with a friend from the knitting group. It was a nice way to spend the afternoon. Both of us were talking too much and ending up tinking quite a bit of our knitting. Oh well, if one is going to make a mistake, a mistake made in the company of a friend is the best!

If your cooler breaks, knit a hat

We don't have central AC. Just evaporative cooling. Which works fine in the desert if the humidity is low....and of course if it works at all.... It went out on Saturday, and 100 degree heat with no cooler is not considered an emergency by the apartment complex. So I sat in my room and knit a hat. Nothing complicated...88 stitch cast on, rolled brim, and some color work thrown in. I like the decreases, tho, which are knit to within four sts of your decrease. K2tog, YO, K2tog. My BFF would complain about the holes and his head is freezing, but for the majority of us, it's just enough of a design to be cute!

So, the never ending put down of knitters that use acrylic yarns has again risen to the surface. I was told that my inability to afford as much wool yarn as I would like is not that acrylic is less expensive, it's that I don't know how to budget my discretionary money. My income is less than $500 and from that I have to pay two major bills, my son's allowance, feed my animals, and then, if there is money left over, or I save for a couple of months, I can buy yarn.

Now, I knit to keep my hands busy. It's not a choice, it's a necessity, called stimming, related to my autism. I knit alot...hours on end sometimes. I go through a lot of yarn. If I, as this person seemed to think I should, use only wool yarn, I just plain couldn't afford to knit. And that's not gonna happen. Acrylic yarn provides me with the opportunity to knit alot, afford to do that knitting, and keeps lots of people on the Cheyenne River Reservation, Eagle Butte, SD, warmer. People just never realized others are bad off in this economy and those of us that were bad off before are now worse off...

Charity Knitting - Being of Service

Chicken Stitches is having a contest with service in mind....

I finally got the Hexie blanket washed and ready for mailing. Today I search for a box and with luck, tomorrow it will be heading to the Reservation with the hope it'll be including in an upcoming auction there. I received more Hexies while I was on vacation, so today I hope to pull all those out, lay out another blanket and start joining them.Some of you may know I homeschooled all six of my kids. In actuality, I unschooled them. John Holt started this trend in Growing Without Schooling. My philosophy is that people will learn what they need to know when they need to know it. My youngest daughter, at almost 28, decided she needed her GED in order to persue an educational path. She took her pretests over the last two weeks, and without any prep at all, no classes, no study guides, just walked in off the street and took the tests, she passed them all with the lowest score at 510 and the highest score a perfect 800. "Approximately 68 percent of all graduating high school seniors earn scores between 400 and 600 on the GED standard score scale. Only 2 percent of graduating high school seniors earn scores lower than 300 or higher than 700." I'm proud!

If you have someone in your life that has Asperger's Syndrome please go read The Waiting Game on Rachel's blog. She describes what an afternoon for us is like.

Charity Knitting Again

It's time to pick up my Charity knitting. I am moderating a group on Knittinghelp.com and on Ravelry to make Log Cabin baby blankets for charity. It's a round robin type group. Each of us starts the center portion, mails it to the next one in line. That knitter adds a portion and mails it on. As it makes the rounds it grows larger and larger till it's done. (If you'd like to join us, just let me know.)

This pic is of my own Log Cabin. It's been alive for a long time now and still isn't finished. Makes a good brainless knitting project.

I finished my first two squares for the 2008 Log Cabin knitting. Some of us are doing both knitted and crocheted blankets. Sometime around mid January I'll mail these out to the next person on the list.







I also worked some on my Tomten Jacket. I'm just about done with the skein of variegated yarn so will have to add a different color to go along with the pink strand. I have about 5 ridges to do before creating the arm holes. I understand how to do all of it, except adding the sleeves, so hopeful I can get someone that's done it before to add some explanation to EZ and Meg's instructions.

Today we're heading out to the movies: National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Reviews aren't that good, but hey, Nick Cage.... It can't be all bad. One review said it was a throwback to the family entertainment reminiscent of the '80s. I can live with that!