The Wonderful World of Wonder Knitting

About a year ago, wanting to get my then 5 year old boys interested in knitting, and give them a quiet activity they could focus on, I bought them each a Wonder Knitter. They took to it immediately, and began churning out yards of i-cord, which then became bracelets, necklaces, etc (although, as with a lot of knitting, for them it's about the process, not the product). In Kindergarten this year, W's teacher was inspired, after I gave the teachers their handknit holiday scarves, to pick up crochet again after many years. We talked about doing something in the classroom, but since the spring was so crazy, I didn't get my act together until late. I bought 4 wonder knitters for the class, and she and I sat and taught the kids one-on-one, each picking it up and his or her own pace. Some kids were new to it, some had done it before with an older sib, but all really enjoyed it. I was away for a week on vacation, and when I came back, she had turned the yards of i-cord into a wall hanging for the classroom. It looked awesome and I was so proud of them! Next year, I'll definitely do it again, but plan a little better. I have a couple of books that show what you can make with i-cord, and I'll make some prototypes over the summer to give the kids some ideas. I thought it was a great way to introduce knitting to young kids before they have the fine motor skills to manage 2 needles.

Technology is not my friend

First the cable goes out for a week, then days later, mysteriously, the hard drive fails. As in dies. As in, if we had been backing up on an external hard drive all along, no biggie (except for the need to now replace a 2 year old computer). Documents, pictures, music, gone. People, I'm begging you, go get yourself an external hard drive and back up today! (As I'm sitting here, I just reminded myself that even though we bought an external hard drive with the new computer, it does no good, IF IT'S STILL IN THE BOX.) Luckily, pictures prior to 2006 were backed up on discs, and most of 2006 was uploaded to Shutterfly, and that was all I really cared about.

Anyway, on to bigger and better. Lots of knitting going on while I had no computer to lollygag away the day on. I'll just show one thing today, though, and hopefully this weekend will put the rest of it together. For my dear friend J's baby shower, inspired by the mitre-passion of january one, I decided to do a MDK mitre blanket. Since she didn't know what she was having, I decided to do lots of gender-neutral brights. Started with 2 skeins of 6 colors each, plus black and white. I was feeling the need to add a couple more colors, then baby J conveniently made his appearance 4 weeks early, the week before the shower. So I added 2 more boyish colors. It's really stunning, and once I seam all the squares, I'm going to add a black and white border, then back it with some black at white fabric (shopping trip to Purl planned for Monday).