Hometown Swap Package Received from St. Louis!

Stitchmarkers from Snazzyb

De-stash Swap Package from wickedstash:

I Need to Know Whether to Knit with this or Not...

Just a Couple of Swap Package Pics

Here's my April swap package from Alix. The theme was The Lace Makers of Glenmara.

And the yarn by itself, which might not show up in exactly the right shade. It is, indeed, purple, however!

Secret Project for Kerry - Progress Pictures



The kits, ready to be passed out



The squares have started to come in!



Squares of the Indiecita Colorway





Squares of Piedras, Purpuras and Zarzamora
(Stones, Purples and Blackberry, top to bottom)



Arco Iris, Rainbow Squares

Nestled in the Lettuce Colorway which will be joining the squares together...

Columns of Color

Squares of Caring for Kerry

Progress report. First of all, Kerry had her surgery Tuesday and hosted a little potluck soiree at her house tonight. Everyone thought she looked fabulous, and she had way more energy than, well, I did. She shared stories of the past week with us while we ate and gabbed, and watched baby Annabelle crawl everywhere and get into everything she possibly could. There was mundane humor along with some pretty darn inspirational, giving-me-goosebumps, powerfully cosmic stories. I wish I could share them all here, but they aren't mine to tell. (Well, except for the stories of mine I made everyone else listen to, but since I'm not the focus here...) Frankly I'm not up for as much typing as that would take tonight anyhow.

What I want to do is record some of the progress on the afghan project for Kerry so I can send people who have and are contributing to it here to see how it's all coming together. We've had $75 in donations so far, which is so heartwarming. That leaves about $175 to go, if there's anyone reading this that would like to contribute some part of that sum. Any amount is welcome, even just a dollar or two.

We've passed out all almost all of the yarn for squares. There's one remaining skein of Arco Iris which we'll cut into if there are more requests for balls. We've been getting 8-9 11g balls from each skein, and 11g is just enough for a plain garter stitch square, so some people have needed two balls or at least a little extra to complete their squares, either because they were knitting a fancier design, or because we weren't entirely precise with our weighing, or because they ended up with dimensions wider than 5" somehow (it happens!).

We also had to hold off on passing out yarn to the wider Madrona School community because the community wasn't informed of Kerry's diagnosis right from the start. It was impossible to mobilize everyone with the velocity we were hoping for when we couldn't reveal the situation. So it was very exciting for me to collect the first returned squares this week and also to see the supply of yarn packets disappear from the basket in the office at last. We rolled more balls and passed them out at graduation and on the playground, and several non-knitters held on to some of the knitting that was being worked on to give it their loving, healing energy.

I'm working on a panel for the center that is a whole skein of the light green "Lettuce" colorway with a heart worked in stockinette, surrounded by a plain field of reverse stockinette. The edges are cabled to give them definition, and I really like how it's looking. I also thought it was apt that I ended up doing "open heart surgery" on it to untwist several columns of stitches when I decided the stitches that make up the center of the heart would be better off that way. And when I was I doing this untwisting? On Tuesday, of course. Probably during Kerry's surgery, in fact.

This center square was supposed to be the one that non-knitters knit a stitch or two on, but so far the non-knitters have been very determined not to knit, so I may end up knitting the whole thing, which of course I am very happy to do. I just hope that I can figure out how to make the heart design actually look like a heart. It's also possible that some wonderful stitchers out there will take the square when I have finished it to embellish it with a message and or some lovely decorations for Kerry. The square should be about nine times the size of the other squares, so it will take about one full skein to knit. That leaves four skeins of Lettuce left for the assembly of all the squares and border of the afghan as a whole. I don't know if it's the right amount; I simply bought all the Lettuce that Linda's Knit & Stitch had in stock at the time. I'm hoping it will magically turn out to be just right, but I'm confident the perfect solution will arise if it turns out we need more of our "unifying" color.

It's so tempting to start the work needed on the squares that are already completed and here with me, but I'm hoping to be able to wait until we collect the rest (or at least most of the rest) so that we can arrange them all before they are attached to each other. That way we should be able to find the most aesthetically pleasing arrangement as well as the most practical geometric arrangement, as there are sure to be some size and shape variations among the "squares." We're also planning on blocking them for the most consistency of size and shape, and we will likely be crocheting around some or all of them to achieve more uniformity for the ultimate cohesiveness of the blanket.

All of that work and the joining together of the squares, as well as the addition of the border, will be a lot to get done in a short time, so we may be putting out a call for more help and/or some afghan bees to work on it together. It also means we may decide not to wait for all the squares to come back before we start the assembly. We'll see. The project seems to have an organic timeline of its own, and we want to make it a joyful, loving experience for all involved rather than imbue it with the mood of stress and deadlines. On the other hand, we would like to have a completed blanket before too much time passes, so we need to shepherd it along with kindness and appreciation.

Today I looked up all the names of the colorways of the yarn we are using. Along with Lettuce, there's Zarzamora (Blackberry), Candombe (a South American Carnival dance), Primavera (Spring), Piedras (Stones), Purpuras (Purples), Arco Iris (Rainbow), and Indiecita, which I think means something like "Independent One." (But if someone knows better, please let me know - my sense is that it has to do with Indie dyers but then has the diminutive added?) I love this collection of names, the images they avoke individually, and the fascinating collection they make as a group - for whatever significance it holds.

I'm hoping to document this process with pictures as well as with words. I showed off some of the yarn in my post about my "haul" from the South Sound Yarn Crawl, but I'm also taking pictures of the yarn baggies we have been passing out and the finished squares as they come in, so before too long I will post some progress shots for everyone to see how we're doing so far.

Thank you to everyone who is contributing support to this project!

Nature & Garden Swap Packages

Here's what I sent:

Here's a close-up of the Growing Leaves Cowl in alpaca that I made to send:

Here's what I received:

And here's a picture of the golden wool with Annabelle's pajamas that made us realize how well that color suits her:

My swap partner did a great job!