Rita's Patchwork Comforter

6/2007



I found this photo of the finished blanket. I crocheted all of the squares together. It's a really neat thing, and Rita loved it. I'd like to make a sampler block blanket. I think Barbara Walker, the stitch pattern guru, has a book about doing a sampler blanket. Fun.


3/2006


I'm in a craft group, "Women Who Run with Glue Guns," and one of our members, Rita, recently suffered a tragedy. She and her husband went to Botswana because her husband, a doctor, wanted to train African doctors on treating AIDS patients. Rita and Dick were on a canoe tour on the Lompopo River and an alligator leapt out of the river and pulled Dick out of the boat and into the water. That was the last they saw of him until his life jacket popped up. Rita was in the boat behind and witnessed the whole thing. This story's been in the papers and on the news, so many of you might have heard about it.

Our group is making a patchwork quilt to help comfort Rita. We're all knitting squares and then a few of us will put them together to form the blanket. The photo shows the squares I've knitted so far. I'll keep posting and showing the progress of the blanket.

Lavender Sweater

I started knitting this sweater about six months ago, and I had to rip out several sections as I went along because I kept messing it up. At the eleventh hour, I decided to change the neckline from a polo-type opening to a crew neck opening, but when it was sewn up, the neck opening was small and looked odd. So, I decided to add a sort of cowl neck in a seed stitch pattern, as you can see in progress in the photo. If this doesn't work, I'll take the thing apart and do the polo opening on the front, or some sort of opening.

The sleeve joins are funky, too. Sort of gappy. I hope this'll smooth out when I do the blocking. I did have fun doing some short rows at the bust to make it hang better in the front. We'll see how this turns out. It's a nifty technique that adds darts where you need them.

Lastly, the sweater is currently too small, but it'll fit soon enough! I hope I don't miss the spring season, though, or next year it'll be too big. Maybe I can wear it at the beach or something. It's knit from cotton.

Stripey Vest

I knitted this for Henry, but it's bigger than I thought it would be so I'm going to give it to Gavin, who's 17 months now, and I'll knit another one for Henry.

The front and back are supposed to be stripped, but I bagged it on the back because each time you start a new color, you have the end of the old color and the beginning of the new color, and that's two tails to weave in. There are about 25 tails on just the front! So, the back is green.

On the next one, I'm going to try a new method of knitting in tails as I go. I hope it works!

Henry

Here's a cute picture of the little big guy. He looks so much like my brother! I love it.

I'm going to update my blog!

I've taken a bunch of photos of my knitted stuff, and I'm finally going to update the blog! I might write about other stuff, too, if I feel like it.

I might write about how many dandelions are growing in my garden right now. I might write about how much I worry about Addie passing on and how I'll ever recover from that. I might write about my childhood friend Betsy, who's having twins at 39. I might write about my nephew Henry and how cute he is and how much I love him. I might write about how much I love Battlestar Galactica and how I don't think I can wait until October for the new season. I might write about losing weight and my Tijuana surgery--45 pounds gone so far. I might write about joining a gym and how I'm 50% excited for it and 50% dreading it. I might write about my sister's new job at a building salvage place and how I'm obsessing on stained glass windows. I might write about my friend who's husband was eaten by an alligator in Africa. I might write about how much I miss my friend Linda. I might write about how much I love Sylvie Hasson. I might write about how my mom's moving back to Spokane and how that means I'll be getting some wonderful hot summer days there.

Those are just a few things I might write about.