The Dandelion Project

My daughter Carmen emailed me this link www.thedandelion.org. Several of these people are friends of my son and were frequent visitors to my house in New Jersey twenty years ago. In fact, Chuckles even lived there for a couple of years. It's interesting to see them now as early-forty-somethings.

Dominic complained that I hadn't posted for a while. Sometimes I don't have anything I want to write.

Knitting:

Although I have other things that have been on the needles longer, these are the three things I'm currently working on. This is a shawl for a friend. I decided that I wanted either a variegated yarn with long color sections or a brushed acrylic that resembles mohair, like the shawl I've been using for twenty-five years or so. After church last Sunday, Lexi and I went to Michael's to see what they had. This Red Heart Collage in the color Tundra was exactly what I had in mind. You can see at the top how long the color sections are. As the shawl gets longer and wider, the colors are only part of a row, but that blends quite well, I think. I've hung it in the closet, with slight weight (three small scissors hanging on the needle) to let it stretch a bit. That will help me decide how many more rows I want to add. This particular color was on clearance, so I bought all nine balls that were in the bin. I'm almost ready to start the fifth ball. Since I now have over 500 stitches in each row (I started with 20), each ball only does 16 or 18 rows.

The second project is a small hat. It has a rolled brim and I'm using a Fibonacci series of 1,1,2,3,5. The yarn is old - how long has it been since Sears sold yarn? It was in my friend Shirley's stash when she died last year. It's orlon. Do those of you who are over a certain age remember how much softer the orlon sweaters were than the regular acrylic ones? They were also more expensive. I coveted them, and finally was able to buy a purple one.

And the third project, which I started after hanging the shawl in the closet yesterday, is a girl's sweater in peach acrylic. The pattern is from a Liesure Arts leaflet of sweaters knit from the top down from 1974. I'll donate it, as well as the hat, to the Lighthouse in Mayfield. That is a shelter for women and their children. I figure that anything I donate there will fit someone, sometime.