Back in November I wrote about knitting hats for hatsgiving.org, a charity collecting hats (homemade or store bought!) to send to pediatric cancer treatment centers across the country. They collected eight thousand, nine hundred and eighty-nine (8,989) hats for children with cancer this year. It turns out that knitting a plain hat in the round (ribbed edge, stockinette for a few inches and decreases at the top, like the Purl Soho pattern “Basic hats for everyone”) is incredibly soothing, and a very satisfying, quick knit. So satisfying, in fact, that when I realized I didn’t have a lot planned for family Christmas gifts this year, plain hats in nice yarn colors became the default. Deep green with an Army patch for the youngster who headed for basic training last summer, shades of blue with a Yankees logo for my mother-in-law, deep red with matching mittens for a friend’s toddler (who got a couple of pairs of mittens mid-winter last year and wouldn’t take them off).
And, lingering in the work-in-progress pile: three little sweaters for one-year-old triplets, intended for their birthdays in August, then for Christmas presents. Finally off the needles in early January, in time for me to catch up on a present I’d had in the back of my head since last February (and also intended for Christmas): a pair of convertible fingerless mitts/mittens for a friend’s teenager, who seemed to be forgetting to wear her existing gloves because she “needed” to be able to use her phone. Convertible mittens are possibly the most clever knitting pattern I’ve come across yet: fingerless mitts, with instructions where to put scrap yarn to pick up stitches across the back of the hand for the mitten top. Advised that her favorite colors in previous years were olive green and purple, I was (astonishingly) able to find a gorgeous green, purple, and turquoise fingering-weight yarn from Knit Picks (Hawthorne fingering, in “Vancouver”). For these, I’m adding an i-cord loop at the end of the mitten top along with a button on the cuff so that she can button the mitten top back when she’s busy on her phone, but wear it flipped over when her hands get cold. The pattern is from glennaknits.com – https://crazyknittinglady.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/podsters-dec15-13-pdf.pdf. I’m enjoying making them so much that I’ve already been gifted an appropriate skein for a pair for himself (from ramenneedles.com), and have selected a Done Roving skein from the stash for a pair of my own. And then I’ll get on with the rest of my list of planned projects (sweaters for other infant cousins, a cowl from yarn I was given for Christmas, a gorgeous scarf/shawl kit also received at Christmas)…. after I finish a couple of pairs of tiny mittens and a little hat for a friend’s toddler.
One of my favorite kinds of knitting is one I like to refer to as “knitting for smallies” – a friend shares the joyful news of an impending new addition to their family, and I immediately start thinking of yarn/pattern options for tiny people. Infant knitting has much to recommend it: unless you’re doing a blanket the project is generally small enough to be finished relatively quickly, there are so many wonderful patterns for little ones out there with so many different techniques, and frequently you can put together something fantastic with yarn any knitter may already have around the house.
Notes from the journey... 