Best Schwag Ever

As Guy says, the best schwag is schwag you make yourself.

Guy's awesome Google socks

Followup: The final chemo cap tally

Here's the followup we promised in our earlier post about chemo caps.

Labeled hats in San Bruno

We ended up donating at least 84 hats, plus three scarves:

• Knitting Pals by the Bay: 59 hats, 1 scarf
• Palo Alto Medical Foundation: 10 hats, 2 scarves
• Overlake Hospital Medical Center: 15 hats

45 Mountain View hats

Some of San Francisco's hats

Hats (and coffee) in Seattle

A knitting day of service

Once a year, our company encourages everyone to spend a workday volunteering. This year, knitters and crocheters in Seattle, Kirkland, Mountain View, San Bruno, and San Francisco decided to make chemo caps—soft caps to be given to cancer patients who've lost hair due to chemotherapy.

Mountain View

San Bruno

We're still tallying the results (the last date to contribute is in July), but some of us (hello, Guy!) worked overtime and finished many hats. We tended to knit stockinette, roll brim hats (either top-down or bottom-up), but some of Guy's many hats had 3x1 or 2x2 ribbing (he says 2x2 has better stretchiness).

Guy wearing one of his 7 hats

Ange knit a couple of Race for Life 2009 chemo caps, which are mostly stockinette but with a pretty lace edge. In fact, the first cap was so pretty that now Ange's sister wants one. Ange's wearing one of those caps in this photo:

Back row: Ange, Liz, Jennifer
Front row: Patsy, Kathy

Liz increased too much on her first top-down hat, so she decided to turn it into a design element. She decreased to the right size, then knit even for a while and finished with a rolled brim. The hats look a little like fat-stemmed mushrooms (in a good way; see the photo above). Liz is planning to publish the instructions on Ravelry, and we'll let you know when they're available.

Last I checked, Mountain View (our biggest campus) had nearly 30 finished hats, San Bruno had about a dozen, Seattle/Kirkland had 15, and San Francisco had 6 (plus a couple of scarves). We'll post more pics and a final tally in July!

A braided cowl

A little while ago, Patsy wore her braided cowl to our meeting.

Patsy in her cowl

Her cowl is based on one that was on the cover of the Winter 2010/2011 Knit Simple magazine [obligatory Ravelry link]. Here's what Patsy had to say:

Basically I wanted to use up stash. I had a limited amount of yarn in three colors, so I changed the pattern from stockinette to garter so I could reduce the width of the braid. Originally the pattern called for knitting a big, flat stockinette rectangle that you sewed into a tube. By switching to garter stitch, I didn't need to working about curling edges, so I could knit a smaller rectangle.

I knit one rectangle per color, sewed the three rectangles together, braided them, and then sewed down the loose ends. I love the color combo. It reminds me of raspberry sorbet. 

Thanks for the details, Patsy!

Spinning with a charkha

Ange brought a pretty little box to one of our lunches, opened it up, and within minutes was spinning yarn!

The box contained a small charkha—a portable, hand-cranked spinning wheel good for spinning cotton and other short-staple fibers.

Apparently, the charkha was an important tool and symbol in the Indian independence movement. It provided a way of producing cotton cloth without having to ship it off to the English cotton mills. Mahatma Gandhi popularized the charkha (as in this video of Gandhi spinning), and early versions of the Indian flag included a charkha.

If you think I've been misspelling chakra this whole time, you're not far off. Charkha and chakra have the same origin, from the old Persian word for "wheel".

Fjord's FO

Behold: Fjord's first finished object since joining Google! (And it's not a sock!)

Melanie and the beret...

He doesn't recall which pattern this is (anyone?), but the yarn is Berroco Ultra Alpaca from Yarn in Hutchinson, KS.

...in a tiny back yard in Kansas

While we were out

We haven't had our regular meeting in a while, thanks to the winter holidays, but we've finished quite a few projects.

Here's Josie's sweater for her new grandbaby. Isn't it beautiful? The pattern is Debbie Bliss's Ribbed Baby Jacket. Here's the pattern's Ravelry page, for your convenience.

Matty's sweater

And here are Guy's tortoise-not-turtle gloves, on top of the tortoise who inspired them. We talked about these before, back when there was only one glove.

Tortoise gloves on a tortoise

Finally, here's the Koolhaas hat I knit for myself (after the Christmas rush) out of that Road To China yarn I gushed about before. It looks gray in this pic, but it's really a beautiful denim-lavender-turquoise mix.

Me and my Koolhaas hat in my glamorous cubicle

I'll post more about our holiday projects as we get more details and pictures.