Peace on My Needles

This has been a tumultuous, and, in many ways, a pretty horrible year. Over the past month, I have been thinking about ways to recover from and counteract the negative aspects and events of 2016. I wasn't coming up with many positive ideas, and then along came Project Peace. The brainchild of The Healthy Knitter (Christina Campbell), it started on December 1 and is a 21-day knit along accompanied by daily blog posts focusing on ways to find inner peace and then spread that peace to others. Today, the Winter Solstice, is the culmination of the knit along, a day for knitters around the world to join together to knit peace into their stitches.

The Project Peace pattern is a cowl with an easy, meditative stitch pattern. It is perfect for focusing one's thoughts on ways to make our personal and larger worlds better and more peaceful places. I chose a recent gift yarn, Dream in Color Jilly, for my Project Peace Cowl. I am just past the halfway point, and even though the knit along ends today, I am happy to keep on knitting until it's completed. After all, I need peace in my life every day. Once the cowl is finished, I plan to chose another similar pattern and use it to take a few minutes each day to focus on ways to make a better, more peaceful world for myself and others.

Best wishes for peace and happiness during the holiday season and in the New Year!

A Few Finishes

Where did November go? I certainly don't know, and here I am on the last day of the month, writing my lone November blog post.

Other than the two recent posts about charity knitting, I haven't written a knitting post since last May. To remedy that, I thought it might be a good idea to share some recent finished objects. I'll follow up in a few days with a post about what I'm knitting right now.

I'm going to start with two projects that have great FO photos, thanks to Mr. D.

The cowl above is my Northwestward Eastward (all links are to my Ravelry project pages), Bonnie Sennott's Eastward cowl. This was a really fun knit, and because it's knit in worsted weight, it will be nice and toasty when the weather turns really cold, which is supposed to happen next week. The yarn is Neighborhood Fiber Company's Studio Worsted in the Lauraville colorway.

Here is the Tea Cozy LYS Tour Poncho, which was Tea Cozy yarn store's free pattern for the Puget Sound LYS Tour in May. The yarn is Bumblebirch Glen, 600 yards of beautiful merino and silk, in the Eggplant colorway. I love the yarn, and I'm crazy about the finished poncho, but I have to admit, all that stockinette was a bit of a slog at times.

Some of you may know that I spent a big chunk of my life in Minnesota, and during that time, I attended and graduated from the University of Minnesota. I'm a proud alumna, and I have wanted to knit a hat in Minnesota's Maroon and Gold for quite a while. Thanks to Wendy Gaal of Knitters Brewing Company, and her superior dying skills, I got a kit of Sockaholic Brewski skeins in perfect Minnesota colors. The result is my Go Gophers!, which is Wendy's Tailgate Party Hat pattern. I decided to add a pompom to the hat, as you can see below. Goldy Gopher, the Minnesota mascot, approves!

Finally, no knitting post would be complete without a pair of socks. Here is my latest pair, Monkey with a Cat's Eye, the ever-popular Monkey Socks pattern. I knit the socks from Hazel Knits Artisan Sock in the Cat's Eye colorway, which has been hanging out in my stash for five years. I'm so glad to have finally found a project for the yarn!

That's it for recent finishes. I'll be back soon to share what is currently on my needles.

Magical History Tour

Two months ago, Mr. D and I spent five wonderful days in Berlin. What a lively and fascinating city! German history, both the good and the very bad, is everywhere. Come join me, through my photos, in the amazing city of Berlin!

The sacred and the profane: the Berliner Dom and the Fernsehturm.

In the Chocolate Department of KaDeWe, an amazing department store with two floors of nothing but food.

One of the very few remaining segments of the Berlin Wall, at Bernauer Strasse, and a portion of the memorial to those who were killed trying to escape over the Wall.

The Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

Art was everywhere, even on a bridge.

Mirrors and walkways in the Reichstag Dome.

That's me, reflected in the central column of the Reichstag Dome.

Gingerbread architecture.

Gelato that's almost too pretty to eat.

A Finished Bear, and Lots and Lots of Hats

I want to let you know that the faceless, armless, skirtless, unstuffed Mother Bear that you saw in the last post did get finished and has already been sent off to the Mother Bear Project in Minnesota. Soon she will be heading around the world to meet her forever friend.

Here she is, hanging out with the "house bears" before she left. I named her Ibby—short for Elizabeth—in honor and memory of my wonderful Aunt Ibby.

This is not the only charity knitting that has been going on around here. This is my third year of knitting purple baby hats for the Click for Babies program, which distributes the hats along with information about "the period of purple crying" that many infants experience in the first months of life. The program is affiliated with the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome. You can find out more about the program here.

I learned about Click for Babies a couple years ago and told my knitting group about it, but we got a late start, so I only sent in four hats, two knit by me and two knit by my friend, Tessa. Last year, I knit nine hats, and knitting group members contributed several more to bring our total to 14. This year was even better. My total of seven hats was down a bit from last year, but my knitting group friends (and the sister of one of them), plus two other knitting friends of mine knit a bumper crop of purple hats! Today I sent off 26 hats to the Washington State Click for Babies Program at Seattle Children's Hospital. I think it may be hard to top this number next year...

Here are my seven hats:

And here is an amazing pile of purple-ness: all 26 hats!

In my last post, I talked about the Knit 15 Challenge. Knitting hats for Click for Babies would be a good way to accomplish your 15 minutes (just sayin'). I will be sharing some other ways to #knit15 in the coming months.

The Knit 15 Challenge

Here I am at the end of July, and I am finally paying some attention to the blog! Oh well, at least I managed to post once this month.

My main reason for writing this post is to show you what I have been knitting during the past couple of weeks, and to perhaps inspire you to think about knitting for a good cause.

This is my current in-progress Mother Bear, Mother Bear #7 (link is to my Ravelry project page). As you can see, she still needs some work; another arm, a face, a skirt, some stuffing. I'm knitting her for a wonderful charity effort, the Mother Bear Project, that brings comfort—in the form of bears—to children in developing nations who are affected by AIDS.

I've been knitting Mother Bears off and on for several years, and the biggest reward for me is seeing the faces of the children when they receive my bears. Here is my latest bear to find her forever friend; so sweet!

If you want to see more examples of the happiness that a bear can bring, check out the photos on the Mother Bear Project's Flickr photostream. I guarantee that those kids will put a smile on your face.

My most recent bear knitting was inspired by my friend, Jill, who is Jillsknit on Ravelry. She has started what she is calling the Knit 15 Challenge. The idea is to spend 15 minutes a day knitting for charity. She saw it as a way to rediscover your knitting mojo if it has gone missing, but even if you have mojo to spare, knitting to help others is also a great way to help yourself, too.

I'd love to see other knitters pick up the challenge. Even if you don't do charity knitting for 15 minutes every day, give it a try when you can. If you post a photo of your charity knitting on Instagram, use the hashtags #knit15 and #knit15challenge.

I have been doing some other charity knitting lately, and I'll be back with more information—and inspiration, too, I hope—soon.

Only 140 Miles Away

Last week, Mr. D and I traveled out of the country to a dynamic and cosmopolitan city located only about 140 miles north of us: Vancouver, British Columbia. Vancouver is one of my favorite cities, and it holds a special place in our hearts, because, thirteen years ago last week, we spent our honeymoon there. Needless to say, our return trip was to celebrate our thirteenth anniversary.

Vancouver is a place we return to again and again, because we like it's many flavors: it's hip, young, old, modern and eclectic. I haven't done a travel photography post in a while, so I thought you might enjoy seeing a bit of the variety that is Vancouver.

Cityscape/Cloudscape

Old/New

Classic

Modern

Green

Blue

Quirky

Delicious

Productive!

During the first three months of this year, I felt like I was plodding through my knitting, but not getting much done. I did finish a few small projects, and one larger one that had been hanging around since 2014, but for the most part, everything else was in progress.

Once I turned the calendar to April, all of a sudden I was finishing projects! That is such a great feeling, and it re-energized my knitting mojo, too. Below is a photo showing almost all of my April finishes. Missing is a cowl that was mostly knit in March and a charity project that had already been donated when I took this photo.

The dark blue item you see underneath is Sally Melville's design, L'Enveloppe, which I call "That Thing". On the left are my Hydrangea Monkeys, which are the no-purl version of the classic Monkey socks. In the upper right is a Click for Babies hat (look for more on Click for Babies and other charity projects in an upcoming post). Finally, the shawl is my Traveling Zoo, Stephen West's Zoolandia shawl. (All links are to my Ravelry project pages.)

I know you can't tell much about L'Enveloppe when it is serving as display background for other projects, so here is a photo of me wearing it. As you can see, it's sort of a poncho. I cast it on right before the Big Road Trip of 2015 last September, and actually knit most of it on the road. Once I was home, it sat for a few months until I was ready to finish it. Now, of course, it's a bit too warm to wear it, but it will be perfect next fall.

There is a tale to tell about the Zoolandia shawl. This is the project that I mentioned in my annual goals post back in January. I cast it on to take with me to the Knitajourney retreat, since I had purchased the yarn at Yarn Harbor in Duluth the first time I attended that retreat, back in 2012. The pattern calls for 438 yards of fingering weight yarn, and I had 430 yards, which I figured would be close enough. After all, what's 8 yards? Big mistake! I hadn't even got to the final pattern retreat and I knew I wasn't going to have enough yarn to finish. So I left out some rows in that final repeat and there was still not enough yarn. Then I decided to look through my stash of partial balls of yarn to see if I could find something that would match one of the colors in the shawl yarn. I came up with about 80 yards of Hazel Knits Artisan Sock in the Violeta colorway, an almost perfect match for the purple bits in the yarn.

So guess what? About halfway through the picot bind off, I started to get nervous—what if I don't have enough yarn to finish? Thankfully, I did, but you can see how much was left in the photo below: that little purple blob of yarn measured less than a yard!

Despite this harrowing finish, the shawl blocked beautifully, and the purple edging looks like a planned design feature, so it ended up a win-win.

There is a lesson in this tale: always read project notes from other knitters. I didn't, but if I had, I would have known that the yardage amount in the pattern was way off. Of course, then I might not have knitted this pattern and I would have missed out on having this pretty shawl.

Knitting, Nature and Friends (Old and New)

Two weekends ago, I made a quick trip to California to attend the Northern California Knitting Retreat. While there, I experienced two days of hanging out with other knitters, making new friends, reconnecting with old friends, going for walks at dawn, and generally having a wonderful time.

In today's post, I want to simply share some photos from those magical two days. This is truly a case of a picture being worth a thousand words. Take a look, let your imagination take flight, and enjoy!

Birthday in Birdland

The inviting pathway above is at the entrance to the trails at the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, where we went two Saturdays ago, on my birthday. It was a cool, cloudy day, perfect for exploring this little natural gem, which I have driven past many times on my way to and from meetings and events in Olympia, which is only about ten miles further south.

The wildlife refuge is especially known for the wide array of birds that live or pass through it, so Mr. D brought the binoculars and I brought my camera's long lens. We were not disappointed.

Not long after starting our walk, we encountered this male Downy Woodpecker. I have never been able to get a good clear photo of one of these intriguing birds before.

The trail initially followed the Nisqually River, and we spotted these Hooded Mergansers swimming purposefully through the water. I love how my photo captured both the still and broken up tree reflections.

Eventually, we reached the estuary, where the Nisqually River and another waterway meet and intermingle with Puget Sound. It is such a beautiful vista! In the photo below you can see a bit of Mount Rainier on the horizon.

The trail continues on a long earthen dike, that eventually leads to an even longer boardwalk. While still on the dike, we came upon a Great Blue Heron.

By the time we reached the boardwalk, the tide was beginning to recede, and we encountered this shore bird (either a Dunlin or a Dowitcher), looking at its reflection in the sand.

A little further on, we observed these Green-winged Teals nibbling something tasty.

We even saw an eagle, but he was too far away, and flying much to fast, to get into a photo. When we returned to the Visitor Center, I was able to get a photo of this flock of geese, heading north.

As you can tell, we had a magical morning, and it was a perfect way to start the next year of my life. Happy Birthday to me!