Coming Up For Air

Once again, it's been a while since I posted, but things have been busy. Lots of lawyers, accountants, etc. meetings in settling Mom's estate and then starting to clean, sort, donate & recycle or toss the things that can't be donated over at the her house. We'll be moving there, hopefully before the snow flies, because once you're inside everything is on one floor unless you go to the basement. The way my poor knees have been complaining about stairs in this tri-level in the recent damp weather, one floor sounds awfully nice.

I have been doing a lot of knitting and crocheting. With the new TV season starting, I've had time over the past couple weeks to finish four new *small* rag-tags. These are 30x36" so they're suitable for use in a wheel chair.









As you can see, two are "planned" while the other two really aren't. My friend Marian from our K4 group brought in a large bag of small balls of yarn for me to use in rag-tags, so with each color change on the more colorful rag-tags, I pulled three balls of yarn from the bag and then used the one that blended best with what I'd already crocheted. I still have bags & boxes of yarn down in the family room, so I'll be crocheting a lot over this winter.



Which brings me to the hat & scarf sets I've been making for the homeless veterans' shelter in Detroit. Back in August, I mentioned the generous donation of the large cones of machine knitting yarn to our group. Here are four of the hat & scarf sets that I've completed. There are almost 30 in all but these four give a good example of the way that the yarns can combine to make very distinct sets. I'm working with three or four strands at a time and using a size 13 circular for the hat and a size P hook for the matching crocheted scarves.

Last Saturday I helped man (or woman) the Sr. Center booth at the annual Barn Daze here in Orion Township. We had hats, scarves and baby sets for sale from our group while the ceramic, china painting & quilting groups also had tables with their items. Barn Daze is a lot of fun for the kids, but there weren't too many people buying - not surprising given our local economy. Still it was a fun day with beautiful weather, lots of visiting, people watching and enticing odors from the Chili Challenge which was set up in the tents next to us. Fortunately, the unsold items can be donated so it's not a complete loss and we may have a pre-Christmas sale at the Center.