Kiss My Knits!

It’s the last day for the Donors Choose yarn contest! Donate $10 to Donors Choose, e-mail me your receipt, and I will enter you in a drawing to win loot from my stash! Each $10 enters you again. The link above has details and pics of the yarn that’s up for grabs.

Donors Choose is currently part of an Amazon.com charity contest, where the charity which raises the most money by today earns up to a million bucks in matching funds. That’s a lot of pencils and notebooks. Also, through today, all donations to Donors Choose are going to fund classroom supplies for Katrina kids, who have been absorbed into school systems which already didn’t have enough for their own students. I shudder to imagine a child losing his or her home, starting over in a new school with new kids, and not having what they need to feel comfortable and succeed. This is a good way to get things directly to a child without worrying about exactly where your money is going.

Right now, everybody who’s donated has a chance to get something. I’ll root around and dig up a few more good quality things to offer if it looks like that will change.

Because I hate to beg and not offer anything in return, here’s a quick and easy scarf pattern for a rank beginner.

Materials:
Size 11 needles
1 skein Noro Iro

CO 150 stitches. I recommend a loose cast on like the cable cast on, since you don’t want the edge of your scarf to pucker.
Knit 10 rows.
Bind off all stitches. I recommend a suspended bind off, because again, you don’t want it to pucker.

That’s it! The blue one is for sale (gotta get it up on the site one of these days) but the rainbow one is my daughter’s. It’s seen a heck of a lot of wear, including being repeatedly stepped on while playing in the snow, and gone in the washer and dryer several times, and has held up just fine. Considering it’s a wool and silk scarf that’s really done great for us, I’d say the 19 bucks for a skein of Iro was well worth it.

My daughter’s is a little long for her, mainly because it was going to be for me, but she stole it. If you wanted to make a kid-friendly version, you could just cast on 100 or 120 stitches.

Happy knitting!