Knitted Mug Cozies

Knittingdaily is an excellent website for knitters and fiber artists. In a recent post, Garter Mug Cozies, a free download is available through April 24 if you sign up for their (free) mailing list. Believe me, you will want to be in this informational loop if you work with fibers.

I am knitting up one of these in green fingering weight wool and am almost finished after working on it for just over an hour. It is fun to watch the quick progress.

A quote taken from Garter Mug Cozies about this handy little coffee accessory:

I recently had to give up coffee. Completely. No decaf, no low-acid stuff, just cold turkey on that lovely, hot, rich, amazing beverage.

Can you hear my whimpering from where you are? So what does this have to do with knitting, you ask?

What if you could combine coffee, mugs, and knitting? What if every time you picked up your coffee mug, you were touching a lovely bit of knitted-up yarn as well?

Garter Mug Cozies, people. They're about knitting, and they're about mugs, and they're easy, and they're pretty, and they are extremely addictive. Plus, the pattern is free.

You've been warned.

Don't blame me if you end up knitting a gadzillion of these for all your friends, and then another badillion for your friends' friends.

Did I mention the pattern is free? Yup, free. But it's free for ONE MONTH ONLY! 30 days of freeness, that's all. As in, today's it's free, and through most of April it's free, and on Thursday, April 24, at 4:59 PM MST, the pattern is still free, and then POOF!—on Thursday, April 24, at 5:00 PM MST, the pattern is not free anymore.

Get it while your coffee's hot.

Now we MUST have a picture, and this looks much better than the stage where my green cozie currently resides. The red cozie pic is from the Knittingdaily website.


Get going!

Beggar Christ Icon

The Catholic Knight says...

use of pictures and statues (iconography) in churches has always been used as a way of telling a story visually. It's no different then when parents use picture books to explain things to small children. The icons (statues and pictures) serve to visually tell a story, and remind people of some Christian truth.

A previously published pen and ink drawing (icon) of the Beggar Christ and Vincent de Paul by Meltem Aktas caught my attention. A copy of her work is displayed in the meditation room at St. Mary’s Hospital Pavilion (oncology clinic) in Grand Junction, CO. It certainly gave me pause after studying this icon and reading the poem associated with the drawing.

On the back of this framed illustration is a poem written by Jennifer Gordon for the 10th anniversary of Colorado Vincentian Volunteers that explains Aktas' rationale for creating this piece of art:

In unfamiliar streets I wander laden
With a loaf so full
That surely there will be enough for all.
In the same streets we meet.
I see your clothes, Your eyes, and think, “Aha!
Here is one who needs me.”
With a smile I hope is warm
I offer you bread
Only to know that the piece you give me
Is exactly what I did not know I needed.

This is my rendition in watercolor (5"x7") of the original painting by Aktas that I completed in 2007.

It is displayed in the living area of our home and is a reminder of my professional and volunteering affiliation with the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth (Kansas).

Knitting Socks, Self Patterning Yarns, Blog Searches

I am excited about learning how to knit socks on circular needles. Tomorrow is my first class at the Tangle yarn store in Grand Junction, CO.

Take a look at the well organized Tangle website. Lots of classes are available for beginning knitters. Note the beautiful yarns, also. I had little trouble in finding a couple of skeins that just begged to be in lap and under my eyeballs for a few days while knitting socks.

Here is a picture of the colorful SELF PATTERNING yarn that I purchased for this sock class project:

What exactly is self patterning yarn? A bit of information from The Boston Globe explains it thusly:

self-patterning yarn is (sic) dyed at intervals so that different colors and shapes emerge automatically, without your having to change yarn or, really, do anything but sit there and mindlessly, happily knit.

Along with the advent of the self-patterning yarn, which arrived in American stores about four years ago, have come new techniques in sock knitting, using circular rather than the traditional double-pointed needles. The two developments have given new meaning to the phrase "foot fetish," sparking interest in both beginning and experienced knitters.

Stripes, zigzags, dots, Fair Isle patterns, or random smudges of color emerge effortlessly from under the knitter's fingers in a hypnotic progression, and the choices are nearly infinite.

A detailed blog site from a woman in France who wrote about her socks on April 3, The French Knitter, is fun to browse. Also, the Loopy Ewe has a complete site and shows fun socks on her April 2 posting. She even mentions Colorado. That is my residential state, and it was fun to read about her adventures in the car while traveling. And I found many more knitting blog sites by performing a simple Google blog search.

A quick lesson on performing a Google blog search for yourself:

1) open up the Google toolbar
2) look to the upper left; click on the MORE tab
3) scroll down to BLOGS and hit ENTER
4) type in your blog topic in the open window bar (example: “socks”)
5) All blogs recently written with that term (socks) in their headlines will be displayed.

If you are an experienced knitter and do not need instructions on making gussets, you might want to try making some socks without a teacher at hand. This link will take you to a free socks pattern: Socks

You can bet I will show you a picture of my finished socks in the near future, dropped stitches, warts and all.