Charity Hats From Stash

Hat #1 blocking on a balloon

This was Plymouth tweed leftover from a sweater I knit for my sister. I knit the hat too big and had to felt it down to a reasonable size.





Hat #2

Noro Kureyon left from a sweater. This is much better in a hat than in a sweater. I knit the sweater in the round and the striping was narrow and busy.






Hat #3

Yarn left over from a sweater for my granddaughter.

Where did I get all this yarn?

There are various motivations for knitting. Most of the time I knit something because I covet whatever it is I decide to knit. I see myself wearing that elegant sweater or beautiful shawl and I buy the yarn fully intending to wear it. More often than not, I end up giving away what I make. But, even so, it is covetousness pure and simple that initiates the project. Other projects begin with a more generous attitude. A pregnant young woman takes the seat next to me in a class for hospice volunteers and I resolve to make something for her baby. I see the Statue of Liberty done in intarsia on the front of a sweater and resolve to knit one for my son, an immigration attorney (I don’t think he reads this.) But my most recent knitting project is a product of embarrassment I felt when I realized the amount of yarn I have accumulated.

When my mother moved out of her house, I took her blanket chest, a very plain old pine box-like trunk. Its straight rectangular lines, hand cut dove tailing, simple lock, and the name and address written on the bottom suggests it carried its owner’s belongings to California many years ago. My parents found it in 1945 in San Jose. It lay discarded in the storage shed behind their first house. My father cleaned it and for more than sixty years it held my mother’s blankets. Now it would hold my yarn.

I placed the familiar old piece in my office, feeling smug that my yarn would be neat and orderly, all in one place, and began pulling yarn stashed in fabric baskets on my bookshelves, in a carpet bag brought back from a trip to Turkey, in plastic bins in my closet, and in bags on the floor. I had yarn set aside for three sweaters. I had lace weight yarn for at least five shawls. I had baby yarn. I had the yarn for the Masters swatches. Not to mention that Peaches & Crème I just bought! Nor all the skeins left over from completed projects because I’m deathly afraid of not having enough to finish. I didn’t even get to the yarn in my sewing room! There was more yarn than the chest would hold.

It’s time to get this under control. My hands can’t knit as fast as I can dream up projects and buy yarn! It’s time to knit down my stash. I’ve made two resolutions: (1) I’m going to knit those bits and pieces of left over skeins into hats to give to charity at Christmas. By Christmas they all have to be gone! And, (2) I’m going to knit one project from stash for every project for which I buy new yarn.

Now…what about all that fabric in my sewing room?

The Company of Women

Yesterday afternoon was the second meeting of our new knitting group – 15 women getting together once a month just to knit. More than half of the group are beginners. They were told to bring size 8 needles and worsted weight yarn. One member, a retired yarn shop owner, taught them the basics, casting on, knitting and purling. The rest of us brought works in progress.

The group came together through our church. We are Catholic and so don’t talk much about religion. For us, it’s more a private matter. Instead, as the beginners fussed over dropped stitches and the difference between knitting and purling, and the experienced knitters offered encouragement, we talked about the things all women talk about: husbands, whether at home, dead or divorced; children and grandchildren; the work we did and do, the goings on in our community; the things that make us happy and the things that annoy. We nibbled cookies and we knit.

Women need the company of women. In another time, when families were larger and less mobile, women grew up surrounded by older women who taught them to knit and sew and talked about life. Younger women learned about marriage and childbirth from women who married and had children before they did. They watched the older women lose children and husbands and learn to laugh again and they knew that they too could learn to laugh again. They watched their grandmothers, mothers and aunts age and die and understood that they, too, would age and die one day. Now our communities are too often segregated by age and we are denied access to the wisdom of those who go ahead of us. Childbirth is feared rather than celebrated. A mother is never good enough. And aging must be denied.

Our knitting group brought women together again and became the means for sharing the wisdom of our experiences again. The oldest knitter told us the yarn she was knitting into a poncho was yarn she had first knit into a sweater while sitting with her husband before his death. She didn't like the sweater and was knitting the yarn into something new. She told us about the yarn and we learned about the days she spent at her husband's bedside. We learned another woman had had cancer as she showed us the chemo hats she was knitting. The youngest knitter, a mother with school age children, told us about her daughters as she knit a backpack for her daughter to give as a birthday gift.

And so it went for two hours of knitting and chatting. After two hours we packed up our knitting, put away the tables and chairs, and lingered just a bit. Someone said we should have our meetings more often. And everyone agreed.

I said I’d never make a dishcloth!

Why would anyone want to knit a dish cloth? Knitting requires time. Each stitch is worked individually. You don’t sit down at the sewing machine and knock off a dish cloth in a few minutes. I don’t know how fast others knit, but the simplest little dish cloth is going to take me a few hours. Then after it is done, what? It gets used! Thrown in soapy water, sloshed around, mangled and soon, stained. It seems like a waste of effort. Knitting should be something to be oohed and ahhed over, something to be worn and attract compliments, a shawl or a sweater perhaps. Who is going to admire a dishcloth?

Nor do I remember the women in my family knitting dishcloths. Perhaps other grandmothers did. The cotton dishcloths sold when I was a girl in the 1950s were loosely woven. Were they based on dishcloths some women had made? I don’t know. I remember my grandmother and older aunts using rags, never a hand knit dishcloth. If knitting dishcloths was something passed down through the generations, it skipped my family.

But I had a little hemp yarn left from the Cool Hemp Ponchette, not enough for a bag. I know from my own experience that hemp is very strong and gets softer the more it is washed. And I’ve read that it has antibacterial properties. I needed a mindless project, something to work on while watching the evening news or visiting with family.

I need to improve some of my knitting for the Masters program. I have to learn to make a seed stitch without holes, cables and decreases without stretched stitches. Hemp isn't the best fiber for working on tension, it has a will of its own. But it is good practice. So I knit a dishcloth.

To make it more interesting, I knit it on the diagonal:

Cast on 3
Knit 2 rows,
K2, yo, seed stitch until 2 stitches before end, k2,
Repeat until half of yarn is used, then start decreasing,
K1, K2tog, yo, seed stitch until 2 stitches before end, K2,
Repeat until 3 stitches remain, knit 3, turn and bind off.
And because I still had yarn, I added a border in single crochet.

Easy enough!

I don’t do anything half way. I jump in with both feet. So, when I decided to knit one dish cloth, I also decided to order some Peaches & Creme to knit more. There were so many colors to choose from and I figured shipping was less per ball the more balls I ordered, so I now have 24 balls of Peaches & Creme.

This fall I’ll be working on the quality of my stitches while making dish cloths to wrap Christmas cookies and breads to give as little gifts. Unfortunately I didn’t buy any Christmas colors. I have to order those now.