Thank you, Year 7 at Meriden

I realised today that somewhere in our rather frantic working bee sewing labels on rugs, that a rug from Year 7 at Meriden had become separated from its identifying post-it note. My apologies to the Year 7 girls who took the time to knit the squares and sew the rug together. If anyone reading this blog can identify the rug, please contact me and I'll post a photo of it together with the attribution.

My interest and love of woolly crafts started through a similar activity at school, in Year 7 (or 1st year back then!) at St George. I came to Sydney halfway through the year and found all the girls at my new high school were busy crocheting squares to make rugs for an old people's home - I had no interest in crocheting, but wanted to be like everyone else, so one of my new friends taught me the basic stitches, and so began my lifelong love affair with wool!

I hope that the knitting skills you have developed in this project, stay with you for the rest of your lives. At the risk of sounding like a "Primer for Young Ladies", it is a wonderful skill to have - you need never be bored because there is always something waiting in your "queue" to knit; knitting provides a wonderful outlet for your creative skills ; the wonderful colours and textures of the yarns are constantly changing and can lead to amazing flights of the imagination; you may have the satisfaction of creating genuine gifts of love for your family and friends; as with the rug you made, there are many opportunities to give to the wider community whilst engaging in an activity you enjoy; and one of the best things about knitting is becoming part of the knitting community - worldwide, people share this love and many friendships are forged over knitting needles and cups of coffee.

Knitting groups are everywhere and one of the best resources for engaging with this wonderful world of knitters is found on the internet - Ravelry - a worldwide group of more than 600,000 knitters. You can find groups within Ravelry to satisfy any knitting interest - groups for young knitters, knitters with a particular technical interest eg lace knitters, or "Woolly Thoughts" for knitters interested in the exploration of mathematical concepts through their craft, "Australians Giving a Knit" for charity knitting groups - there are even  groups for those who watch certain TV programs while they knit! :o)  And, if you can't find a group to suit your needs, you can start your own! It is truly amazing and I would recommend that you join Ravelry  if you are interested in knitting.

The other source for those who want to explore all the aspects of knitting, is the NSW Knitters Guild.  There are many suburban and regional groups. For younger members, the Inner City Group meets at Customs House at Circular Quay and is a fun, buzzy group.

Thanks again, Year 7 - long may you knit!

We meet again ...

So ....  we had the first meeting of the new year last Thursday. School holidays are always a quiet time - many of us have baby-sitting duties, so it was great to see thirteen people around the table, including Sally (Ravelry name: Pompom) and Jennifer (Ravelry name: mk1k1). And both came bearing gifts of wool for the group - thank you!

We have been very lucky lately, with a large donation of yarn  from Cecilia (Ravelry name: Cecilia1) and the first of the yarn purchased with our grant from the North Epping Bendigo Community Bank. This leads us to an interesting dilemma - despite having many "famines", we now have a "feast", and the dilemma is where do we keep all these goodies? The librarians office is currently bursting at the seams with our rugs for Wrap With Love,  our knits for Winter Warm, and our stash of yarn.

I'm constantly amazed at the good humour shown by the library staff in the face of this takeover of their precious office space!  One way we can reduce the clutter in the office, is to send our completed wraps off to Wrap with Love as they are finished, rather than holding them until the ABC Knit In at Hornsby Library in August. We all love the feeling of presenting a huge pile of rugs in one hit, but our egos have to take a back seat here, so we had a working bee on Thursday  to sew labels on the completed rugs and to photograph them for our scrap book. I'll be posting photos of the completed rugs so that you can see them - in the meantime, this is the pile that have gone off to the warehouse - 27 rugs in all:

We also have two bags of clothes on the way to Winter Warm via Sally. So that frees quite a lot of space for our new goodies. We will spend some time this week sorting out the old stash - there is quite a lot of yarn there that is "desperation yarn" - only used when there is absolutely  nothing else, so that can can be stored in someone's garage in strong garbage bags until we are desperate again!

Later this week, we may be able to show you some photos of the beautiful yarn that Cecilia donated.