First Wheelchair Lap Throw

My knitting lately has consisted of making lap throws that will fit the needs of a wheelchair user. These need to be sized so that they do not drag and catch in the wheels and they need some way to hold them in place so that they don't slide off the lap of the user.

The first problem is solved simply with the use of a measuring tape. The second is solved by attaching a tab with a buttonhole so that the tab will loop over the user's seat belt and then button onto the throw. A pocket is also part of the design, made to sit on the person's lap.

Here is a picture of the one I am currently finishing made from red, white and blue Lion Cotton (yarn made in America).

The ungainly looking hole is actually a knitted in slit for a pocket that will be added to the wrong side. Here is the pocket before it is sewn together and then sewn in.

The tab is made but not yet attached, so that will be a photo in the next post.

The pattern will be posted on my Etsy site as a pdf file for immediate delivery. I plan to donate a portion of my sales for this and similar patterns, to Valley Medical Foundation for the Spinal Cord Injury Unit's use.

The most difficult part of the design, I think, will be writing the instructions for placing the pocket to be sewn into the throw. I got it wrong several times before I got it right, just in the doing yesterday, so writing it will be an interesting challenge. If it is truly never to late to learn, then I guess it is not too late to become a technical writer, even if it is just for my own patterns.

I am so grateful today that the heat wave has ended and I am making progress on projects I have been planning for several months.

More Made in America

A few posts back I wrote about "Made in America". Here are a few more knitting projects made from American Yarn,

This small pink bag, made with a crocheted button and designed to fit over a wheel chair belt first appeared as a swatch. It is made from Caron, Simply Soft. The button is so cute! These buttons are also great fun to make. At the beginning, the little project doesn't look at all like a button, not even button like. Then at the last pull through, pop, a button! I found this tutorial, www.beatknitting.com/2008/11/crochet-button-tutorial.html

I hope to have a pattern for this little beauty up on Etsy before too long.

The next two projects are made from a pattern that I adapted from a kit. I believe that the seller is Country Wool, http://www.countrywool.com . Country Wool carries yarn from Brown Sheep Company.

Here are the pictures

I am grateful for the fun that I have with knitting; that the things that I make are useful and pretty and that I can still find yarn that is made in America.

Sunshine and Pictures

Today the sun shone long enough to take decent pictures. First I took the baby sachet that I kept when I sent the package off to my sister earlier in the week. Here it is.



My sister called just as I was beginning to write this post and she was so excited that her package arrived today! (I love priority mail.) We have a ritual that when I send a package, she opens it while we talk on the phone. I could hear her excitement and feel it too! She loved the sachets.

The last picture that I took was of these white and purple mitts. I can even type with them on my hands.



Several years ago I was experimenting with making triangle scarves and seeing how much I could make with one skein. For some reason, I made two of these in ribbing, which made them long and narrow and not very useful as scarves. They sat and were about to hit a give away bag a few weeks ago when I thought, "Wait a minute, the yarn is perfectly good and it is one of my favorite discontinued yarns." (Lion Brand, Wool Ease, Sport Weight) I had discovered that I particularly liked to combine two strands for a tweedy effect. So these mitts or wristers quickly materialized.

I am so grateful that the package reached Toledo safely and that the sachets are so pretty and so well-loved. Grateful for today's sunshine, too. More rain is on the way.

New and Fun Things

You will notice, if you scroll down a bit through the links on the right hand side, that I have added an RSS feed to St. Anthony's messenger for the listing of the Saint of the Day. I notice that today is St. Hyacintha. I have never heard of this saint, but I am familar with the flower, so I will have to follow the link myself to find out more.

I have also been knitting this cold month of short days. New yarn from one of my most favorite EBay sellers, Over the Rainbow Yarn.

One project is now done, although this is what it looked like when I snapped a picture on Wednesday.



This is yummy yarn, handpainted in a subtle colorway that I think was called "Painted Plums".

More yarn arrived this week and it is shown in the next two photos.



I called the image, "Wild about Yarn" and then took a second one, "Wild about Yarn,2".



I am making simple, garter-stitch triangle shawlettes; mindless knitting for the hour so each evening that I watch mindless, "guilty-pleasure" television, usually re-runs of NCSI on cable with the space heater taking the chill off the living room and the clock ticking until it is close enough to bed-time to turn up the heat before going to bed. (If I don't start out warmed up and with the chill off the house, the electric blanket doesn't heat up enough. New technology.)

Probably the yarn has cost more than I have saved on the heating bill by rationing my use of it so tightly. Paying for the yarn, however is a pleasure, while the utility bill is not! The woman who handpainted the yarn is in business for herself and we all know about the utility companies...

So today I am grateful for sun shining on my keyboard and warming me as I type. (Although I will rejoice if we finally get rain, which we desperately need), for St. Hyacintha, whose name sounds like a flower and for yarn.

And I do wish I knew how to tell Blogger to insert the pictures where I want them instead of at the top of the typing block!

Thanksgiving 2008

There are so many things to be thankful for even though this has been such a difficult year for so many of us.

One thing to be thankful for is that it is nearly over! The new year always brings a sense of hope and expectation and fresh start and I hope that will be so.

I am thankful for my family; for friends near and far and for this marvelous communication technology that brings us all together even when we are far away. It is hard to believe that I have only had email for a little over ten years and that the grocery delivery service that Papa and I originally bought an Internet ready computer for, Peapod, has been long gone.

So many ways to access the web and make it useful exist now that didn't exist then, that I can't help being grateful for them, too. (Even the game that I play compulsively on Facebook called Pathwords is something that I am grateful for.)

The weather is mild and beautiful and that is a tremendous blessing. I spend the winter living in fear of my heating bills, mostly because I never know until I open them what they are going to be. It would be nice to know, to have some sort of inside meter on the furnace or thermostat that would show me how I am doing and then have the rates clearly stated on the web so that it would be possible to plan a little better.

Since that isn't possible I am grateful for obsessive knitting in past years that has given me a wonderful pile of hats, scarves and mitts that keep me warm with lower thermostat settings. I am also grateful for polyester fleece and think it is cool that it is made out of recycled plastic bottles.

I am grateful that I am still able to live in my own house and that I can even have a bit of garden thanks to friends who share in that.

So even though I don't have a big Thanksgiving dinner in the works, I am grateful for my blessings and give thanks on this day of thanksgiving.

Homemade Luxuries

I was sixty before I discovered the immense pleasure of using a hand-knitted washcloth to wash my face. Now I don't want to use any other! I am spoiled.

Knitting washcloths is easy, rhythmic and mindless knitting--until the middle row when one has to remember to "reverse engineer" the thing and start making decrease rows. After that it goes back to being automatic. I can see why women made washcloths in bygone days--they weren't swamped with mail order catalogs advertising sales, couldn't drive to the outlet mall and needed something to do with their hands that would soothe their minds.

Washcloths are the epitome of "mindless knitting" and would occupy time while waiting. Women have always waited, for children, for husbands, for sailors to come home from the sea, for wars to end, and just for pots to boil.

Now I knit to wait for the news to get to the weather so I can turn it off and go to bed. I knit because it's there to pick up and soothe. I knit to experiment with different yarns and eventually I plan to design and knit a sweater to keep me warm.

Hand-knitted items are homemade luxuries. So much nicer than store-bought. So much more personal than mass-produced. I wear hats all winter and I hope to venture into socks eventually--but I think I really do need a teacher for that.

Chocolate fudge is another home-made luxury. That is another post! I am grateful to make something mundane into something extraordinary and to make it for myself.

Weather Continues Perfect for Knitting and Puttering

It's raining again. Not, thankfully, windy. So it is a cozy day to sit here and play with my valentine's designs at Cafepress, make a to do list for the young lady who will come help me later today and finally remember to blog.

These last few nights I have been using a cozy, very light wool shawl that I originally intended to put up for sale on Etsy. It took so long for me to knit it that I decided it was my "Christmas present to myself". A beautiful hand-dyed mix of red and cranberry and blue that is reminiscent of berries, it is also feather-light. Described by the eBay seller as fingering weight and perfect for socks, it would have made a lot of socks!

That reminds me that I need to learn to knit socks. I have lymphedema so my legs are different sizes, with one swollen so that no knee sock fits. Since I believe in dressing warmly before putting the heat up, hand-knit by me stockings to fit woudl be a practical boon. Maybe this winter. If not, maybe next summer.

I am finishing two pairs of "wristers" or fingerless gloves that I found I had not completed last winter. One pair for this computer and one for the other. Soft, warm wool from Lorna's Laces that may just be the prettiest wool on the planet.

It is good knitting and puttering weather, so on to the puttering. If all goes well there will be pumpkin muffins later.

Winter is here!

Technically, winter may still be three weeks away but we are having a blast of cold Canadian air this weekend to remind us that weather is not under our control and even in Silicon valley is not always perfect! Very, very glad I don't live in Canada--or anywhere really cold. It is supposed to become cloudy tonight and therefore warmer.

Since it seems that wherever I set the thermostat, the furnace is going to run, I have set it back a bit and found my great outdoor vest to zip on. This is a garment made from polar fleece and wool. I have never seen another made from this mix--and would like more.

Even inside, a hat helps warm me and I wear knitted caps all winter long both day and night. (Remember, "Mama in her kerchief and I in my cap" from the Night before Christmas? There was a reason for that!)

Two pairs of socks help insulate my feet from the cold floor. A footstool or old pillow would help here. Our ancestors opted for the footstool. Most of the time I elevate my feet on another chair so they are level with my wheelchair seat. This counteracts the swelling from post-polio syndrome and lymphedema that I need to combat all year round and makes it easy to wrap up in a fleece throw.

Fingerless gloves help too. In fact, last year about this time I posted my directions for making fingerless gloves, also called wristers, on my Knitting soothes my troubles away Squidoo lens. Wristers make great Christmas presents, if you knit and they knit up very quickly. Some of my favorite yarn sources are posted on that lens too.

Even indoors, I wear a scarf or neck warmer all winter too. Neck warmers are also very easy to knit--just knit a tube. They are essentially the neck of a turtleneck, nothing more and ultra simple.

Last night I let my knitting fall to the tray table I set up across my lap and just enjoyed the Hallmark movie A Grandpa for Christmas. It was charming. I went to bed comforted and warm for a "long winter's nap".

Tomorrow is the first Sunday of Advent. It is one of the most beautiful times of the year in the Liturgy and, I think, the one season that the feminine most comes to the fore. It is such a shame that it gets lost in the shuffle of the commercial bustle. We need to reclaim it. (Wear a button proclaiming I keep Advent from my cafepress store--shameless promotion here--and join me in reclaiming this lovely season.)

Waiting

Yesterday and today I waited. While I waited I knitted. Somewhere along the way I made a major mistake. Over the next few days I will "unknit". Not as much fun as knitting, but the yarn is pretty. That will make the reknitting less tedious. At time I thought about starting a knitting business. I found that I could not knit fast enough and kept losing the scraps of notes that I took to turn into a pattern. No patterns emerged, except the patterns about myself that I learned from knitting--and other projects. Some of the current projects may go up on Etsy.

Part of the waiting consists in tracking packages through UPS. This is almost as much fun as ordering the packages or their actual arrival. I can track the packages I send too, one is on its way to my sister and I will know exactly when it arrives. This is fun, but probably not the most powerful thing the Internet is capable of giving us.

Yesterday while I waited for the UPS driver to collect the package I was shipping, I knitted and watched Oprah. The You Tube inventors were on. I haven't thought of using You Tube. (Somehow videos of me waiting and knitting don't seem like they would draw much of an audience.) Still it is rather interesting to play around with. Could I promote my Peace design with You Tube? More to think about.

It was a long day yesterday for another reason and that is that I had seen a blurb on Hallmark that they were going to show Pollyanna on Tuesday. I thought this would be two hours. It was three. Way past my bedtime! Still, it was a charming and sweet as I remember; the performances were quite good and it was stylized in a way that is so different from today's movies.s I remember when this movie first came out and that I went to the library in what was then my new hometown (we had just moved here) to find the book. It turned out to be a series, if my memory serves and it was long out of print already in 1960. Although it has not been a conscious expectation on my part, I have waited for a long time to see it again.

Tomorrow is another day and hopefully I will have more to say. Goodnight and God bless.

New Peace Button

Cafe Press has launched 3.5" buttons on its site. My Peace design is now available along with the gratitude design and I Keep Advent. As I write this morning I am looking at a Peace flag I printed on cloth through my ink jet printer yesterday morning and I am happy. This is so cool! To print on cloth as well as a large variety of papers. While I ate breakfast, I pondered the design trying to remember all the languages. I can remember most of the languages. Spanish, Italian, Afrikaans (in honor of a dear family friend who nagged me and then recommended me to Stanford), Vietnamese for another friend, whose kindness, patience and wisdom inspires me. Tagalog in honor of my friend who brings me communion, Hebrew and Arabic. Russian is there, as well as Hungarian, Welsh and Icelandic. I will have to look them up though, to remember which is which. It is a long time since I fist started to work on this design.

Yesterday I began to use my new nutrition software and see it as a tool that should help me. For the first time in a long time I did actually measure the fat I used to saute the mushrooms. Lo and behold, they would have sauteed with less. So next time, less is more. The simple leg lifts that I can do from my wheelchair are proceeding. Up from three reps once a day to five reps three times a day. Long way to go still, but something is better than nothing and movement is one way to combat SAD, which will come as daylight savings time ends.

The week is almost over, Halloween is just around the corner, and there are so many projects calling my name! Maybe they were what kept me awake last night! In just this week I have knitted two long fluff scarves from Crystal Palace Splash, an eyelash yarn that is soft and shiny, great fun to work with. A third is well started.

Pray for Peace.

Random Thoughts

It was hot today and the house is cooling slowly so I don't have much energy or inspiration. Even the sunflowers seem to be feeling the heat as they are flopping over even before they go to seed.

In spite of the heat, I finished knitting a scarf last night, one in a series of three. Each is a different color of Lion Homespun and a slightly different stitch pattern. I plan to write up a pattern for them to make available, either here or on Etsy and put them up for sale. They have been a pleasure to knit. The yarn was a rummage sale find by my dear friend L and I am also knitting some other sparkly yarn that she found for me. The sparkly yarn knits up long and narrow into a variation of what the maker, Crystal Palace Yarns, calls "jewelry scarves". I like the concept.

Much work lies ahead for me to get my Cafepress shop, which I have been neglecting, ready for the coming Holidays. It seems sad in some ways that summer is ending, but Fall is my truly favorite time of the year. I need to return to two writing projects as well, one a memoir, begun just as summer was beginning and the other a long, discursive historical novel that I began too many years ago. Perhaps this will be the year...

The studio is taking shape and I am very happy with it.