Yarn Along - Flood and BSJ

Joining in for Ginny's Yarn Along again this week.  Check out lots more knitting and reading on her blog.

My brother found my size 3 needle tip!  He was riding in my car, where I had been sitting and knitting before the tip went missing, and it somehow revealed itself to him, because he just picked it up off the floor.  Hooray!  With this find added to all the wonderful knitting Christmas gifts, he is in the lead for doing the most to facilitate my knitting this year.

So now that the tip has returned, I'm knitting away on the next Baby Surprise Jacket.  For this one I'm trying five-row stripes.

This year marks 100 years since the Great Miami River flood of 1913.  My senior thesis was on this flood and the response to it.  Hamilton and Dayton, Ohio, were worse than decimated -- estimates are that one out of three Hamilton residents were homeless (at least temporarily) after the flood.  75% of buildings flooded.  (Way worse than one out ten.)  Afterward the people in this valley created the Miami Conservancy District, which is still a national model for regional flood control.  None of the areas designed to be protected by the massive works of the MCD has flooded since.  The flood was the last week of March, and there are going to be lots of commemorative events this year.  I'm preparing by reading through the books I still have from my senior thesis days.  The one in the picture is "Through Flood, Through Fire:  Personal Stories from Survivors of the Dayton Flood of 1913" by Curt Dalton.  There is a real wealth of first-hand accounts of the flood.  Personal stories are a very powerful way to study history.

Three days - three dishcloths

This weekend was my five-year college reunion. I love going to reunion with the wonderful ladies of the old Western College for Women, and I haven't missed one yet!
This year there was a call for people to bring old kitchen supplies so that the current students can have all the cookware they might want in the dorm kitchen. Since I've only had my own kitchen for not quite 5 years now, I haven't really accumulated much in the way of kitchen ware that I don't use anymore. So I knit them a couple of dishcloths instead!



I knit these while in reunion events this weekend out of one ball of Sugar'n Cream. Both knit on the bias, increasing one stitch every row until I felt it was big enough and then decreasing one stitch every row. Somehow the rates of increase and decrease look different, so I ended up with non-square dishcloths, but I figured it didn't really matter. On one I used yarn overs to create a little border and on the second one I did not. I love watching the variegated yarn change colors and stripe or pool. The colorway is Sunkissed, and the darkest blue here (not that you can tell from these pictures) is almost the right color to be Western blue. Just in case you're wondering, my new camera can indeed take better pictures than this; I just took these quickly in the ground floor corridor late Saturday night before I turned the cloths in to the collection box. They got a lot of cool stuff for the kitchen, including dish soap and cook books. The students should be all set next year!

I finished the two Western dishcloths before all the reunion events were done, so I knit another one. This is the advance guard of the Christmas Knitting.

That's a somewhat better photo. Also Sugar'n Cream, Summer Splash colorway, knit in the Bee Stitch from Leisure Arts' "Kitchen Bright Dishcloths." Again, you can see I'm not terribly focused on the idea of square. Which actually fits really well with being at a Western reunion.

I had to set aside the third Cotton Candy dress for a week, but am ready to get back to work on it at knit night tonight. Meanwhile, enjoying a rare afternoon off!