That was easy!

Greetings from the Random Number Generator! Today is Saturday, November 16th, and I have to choose a random number from 1 to 4. Hmm… (pulling imaginary beard), I think it will be number three!

As you might remember, Karen Adams in her post about Monsters at the Hospital generously offered a wonderful kit to knit comfort toys for children who stay at the IWK hospital after invasive tests or surgeries. Thank you, Karen, for your inspirational post and a great prize.

The lucky winner is a commenter number three, Nicole Hilts. Congratulations, Nicole! Please reply to the confirmation email so I could deliver your package.

Everyone else — thanks for playing!

How far is Lunenburg?

According to my calculations, Lunenburg is one bear away from Halifax.

Last Saturday we decided to drive to this little town to visit the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic and pretend to be tourists in other creative ways, such as eating seafood lunch and taking pictures.

Lunenburg is a home port to the famous schooner Bluenose II but since we didn’t get to see it, here is a picture of a less famous blue lobster that lives in the museum’s Aquarium.

The drive from Halifax to Lunenburg is a little over one hour and I took a knitting project with me, as any sane knitter would. The problem is, I can’t knit in the car because I get car sick. The moment I take my eyes off the road, I feel nauseous and then hate my knitting for the rest of the trip. However, this time I was smart and picked a project that I can literally knit with my eyes closed. It’s a teddy bear, worked flat in garter stitch.

I was playing with the novelty raffle yarn to see if it could be used together with regular yarn to add details. That’s why this bear is wearing a tutu. (I am still debating if this yarn is pure evil because it’s all twisted and I keep untwisting it and it’s super annoying).

On a finishing note, I realized that the side seams can be done by garter mattress stitch as demonstrated in this video by Knitpicks. It creates seamless fabric and your bear will look really neat even if you hate seaming. This is a side of the leg, and the stitching is almost invisible.

You know what those bears are for, right? So next time you travel in the car and need a mindless project, think about it. Maybe it will bring you comfort too, when you are a few bears away from home.

We did it!

Today we knit in public. In a pub. In a public pub. Would it be too much to suggest that if it rains during your World Wide Knit in Public day (as it did today in Halifax), you could still make it to your Would Wide Knit in a Pub day? As an official plan B, you know? So, thanks to HRM WWKIP group, the day was saved.

There were about 25 knitters there and we had the whole room to ourselves. Two attending babies brought their moms who happened to be knitters. There were awesome door prizes from local yarn stores, LK Yarns and The Loop, and a tray of delicious cookies from Ciboulette Café.

Also, look what knitters made for the IWK!

That cute bear is made with self-striping yarn but it looks like he is wearing cute summer-y pants. Which immediately gave me an idea to try making comfort dolls with self-striping yarn instead of joining new yarn for different clothing items and then dealing with all those loose ends… If you know of something suitable, please leave a comment.

Also, the game is on. So far I am only taking people’s names for the raffle, and if you want to win these things, you don’t have rely on luck alone. There are two prizes for prolific knitters, and so far we have 4 hats/bears and 10 puppets as top numbers. Whoever makes most puppets, and also dolls/bears/hats combined wins a prize.

For those who didn’t make it to the HRM WWKIP today, keep an eye for the charity knitting display announcements. (I kept typing and deleting the next sentence because I want to sound intriguing but don’t have enough information to start actual planning.) So I gave up and will say just one thing — please draw a little ball of yarn with needles on your calendar,  Saturday, June 23. If this idea works, we will have some knitting fun and do all things we couldn’t do today because of the rain. If not, we will have a draw and announce winners on that day.

How does that sound?