Teeny Preemie Hats

These three teeny hats, which I knit in worsted weight Wintuk acrylic using Bev's Baby Ribs Hat pattern (with 48 stitches on size 4 needles), are going to the Salem Hospital to keep some preemie babies warm.

It's a service project that the Salem Area Ravelers came up with for this month. On learning that the hospital can use ten or more preemie caps every month, we're thinking about making this our ongoing service knitting project. Preemie caps knit up fast in all weights of yarn, and so long as they're made of washable yarn, our hospital will take most types of fiber. Several others in the group used leftover sock yarn and came up with some adorable little caps. We collected ten this afternoon at our knit-in, enough for a month, it seems (the coffee mug on the left of the photo gives an idea of the size of these teeny hats). We'll see if we can keep up the production and keep the hospital supplied.

On the needles: Pondemonium and a real, live sock

It's cute, but what is it, right? Not a hat -- it's Pondemonium, which will, when it is done, be a gift for a colleague whose wife is expecting a baby this spring. After the sleeves go on, the embroidery happens to turn the squiggles and blobs into snakes, spiders, frogs, and ducks. Appropriate for a couple of wildlife biologists, no? The original pattern calls for Rowan Wool Cotton, but buying all those balls at about $10 per ball would have cost over $120 to make the sweater. I settled for Elann Sonata in all-cotton, and I'll put a button placket in one shoulder to make it easier to get on and off since the cotton yarn is less elastic than the wool-cotton blend.

And isn't it time I knit something for myself? I bought a 450 yard skein of Pagewood Farm hand-dyed Blue-face Leister sock yarn from the Rose and Ram knit shop. That ought to make a few pairs, I reckon. I've knit bed socks and once knit a pair of socks from worsted weight yarn, but this is my first pair of real, live, sock yarn socks, proper socks, wear-out-in-the-street socks. I'm using the basic top-down sock recipe from Knitting Rules!, knit in the traditional way on DPNs. Isn't that colorway delicious? It's called "Meadow," but it reminds me more of a pond with purple and blue iris reflected in it:

I'm thinking of making this a sock year, and explore knitting toe-up socks, magic loop socks, and whatever other sock-knitting options I find time to indulge in, just to try them all out and decide how best I want to knit socks. There's even a spiral tube sock I found in an old WWII-era Red Cross knit for the troops book that I might try out.

FO: Prayer Shawl

The Prayer Shawl is done and Edison put his paw-print of approval on it. It's been delivered, and Nikki was pleased with it. I forgot to ask if I could post her picture, so I won't here, but it fits nicely around her shoulders and she says that it keeps the drafts off when she's reading in bed. She's still in the recovery process from her heart attack, and had another stent put in and still needs one more. It's a tough road to recovery, especially for Nikki who can never sit still. Several of us in the department are going to cook up some low-fat, low sodium food that can be frozen so she'll have meals taken care of for a while.

Free vintage 30's sweater patterns

Hop over to the Subversive Lesbian Anarchic Knitta blog (yes, you heard that right!) for a look at some perfectly gooorgeous Patons and Baldwins' women's sweater patterns from the 1930's. The copyright has expired (the blog author checked to be certain), so they're in the public domain and safe to copy and share. I'm in love with the "Faith" sweater. It'll take some mathematics to figure out the right gauge and a suitable yarn to use.

ETA: There's a second book of 30's patterns that just went up.