Last week I pulled out all of the chemo hats that I had made on the Sentro knitting machine during the month to get them ready for donation. It wasn’t hard work at all; I just needed to tie off the ends, weave them in, stuff the hats into bags, and then complete a label for each hat. Piece of cake.
Here’s the deal. All of these hats were made from yarn that has been lurking in my stash for years. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t call my yarn room a stash… it is more like a carefully curated collection of treasured yarn acquisitions. Yarn that was the extra skein for a sweater I knitted. (Have you ever knitted a sweater? You always buy that extra skein!!) Yarn that was bought for a fade that didn’t quite work out. Yarn that I bought because… did you see that color!!! Yarn that I bought as a greatly used staple color (AKA purple or grey). As I finished off each hat, I remembered the name of the yarn, sometimes the colorway, what the yarn was made of, where I had acquired it, and the project that I had meant to use it for… hat by hat, I was filled with the memories of past outings with friends, knitted projects, and various hopes and dreams of the yarny variety. So many memories, now made into chemo hats.
See that green hat? I used that green yarn to make my knitworthy niece the Mando mitts. Actually, my niece wanted the mitts so badly she bought the green yarn and had it shipped to me. Look at how cute those mitts are!!! I bought that hot pink multicolored yarn while on an outing with friends to yarn shops up in Loveland and Ft. Collins in Colorado. We ate lunch together out on the patio of a yarn shop with an attached restaurant: best day ever!!
The yarn for these two hats was leftover skeins from two sweaters. The rose-colored yarn came from Western Sky Knits, and I bought it up in Estes Park at the wool market there one June; I used that yarn to make Rannuculus. The darker rose yarn was bought at my local yarn store one February as their “yarn of the month”; I used that yarn to make a VNeck Boxy sweater that winter.
The blue yarn is named “Cloud Atlas”, and I just loved it! I made some Geology Socks from the yarn, and I’m pretty sure I made some fingerless mitts also. The purple is called “Empower Purple”, and I bought it because… well… don’t you feel empowered just looking at that yarn? I hope that the two hats that I eventually made from the skein will make their recipients feel dang empowered!!
It took most of the afternoon to get the hats all finished and bagged. All that yarn and all those memories, carefully finished, bagged, and tagged. Last Saturday I handed them into Frayed Knots, and eventually they will make their way to one of the infusion or cancer centers in the Denver/Aurora area here in Colorado.
May all of their new memories be good ones.
Note from Midnight Knitter:
It was a crazy end to the day as I finished up with the hats. There was an owl calling as the sun set and twilight arrived: when I took a small break to go water outside, I could see him sitting on top of my neighbor’s chimney silhouetted against the dusk sky. Between hoots from the owl, I could hear huge transports from the nearby Space Force base passing over my house as they clawed their way into the sky right after takeoff. It was kind of a surreal experience between the avalanche of memories, the owl calling in the dusk, and the roar of planes in the dark.
Do you see how low that plane is? I took this picture earlier in the summer, and you can see why it is hard to get a shot. The planes are so low I can’t see them until they are right over my yard! I’m pretty sure these are C-130 Hercules. That owl is a great horned owl, and I think that he and his friends are responsible for the recent decline in the bunny population in my neighborbood.
Yarn, Books & Roses 