Crafty Help for Fire Victims

Reports out of Colorado are that the biggest fires are now mostly contained, thank goodness, and thoughts turn to helping people recover who may have lost everything. Craftsy, which has its headquarters in Denver, recently reported that it made a $3,000 donation to the Rist Canyon Volunteer Fire Department and was hoping to help raise $10,000 through First Giving (as I write this they hadn’t quite raised $4,000, so help them out if you can!).

I talked to a pal at Interweave, located in Loveland, last week, and she said no one at the company had lost their home but friends and family had been impacted. There’s a story on the Weaving Daily website about Nancy, a woman who lost everything in the Waldo Canyon fire, including her beloved cat and her loom. Fiber folks are stepping up with offers of looms and yarn, which is lovely to see. And a contributor to Spin-off, Kris Paige, lost her home and barn to the High Park fire. All her animals were temporarily relocated, and the family has set up a website to accept donations to help in their recovery.

One other way knitters can help is by buying Bijou Basin Ranch yarn. The company produces yak yarn and fiber products and is located in Elbert, Colo. They’ll be donating at least 10 percent of all online sales of fiber and yarn to the Red Cross and the Colorado Professional Firefighters.

Know of other ways knitters can support those who have been affected by the fires? Spill it!

[Photo of the High Point fire in June by Bijou Basin Ranch.]

I guess I must have had this pattern on my mind, because I had chosen this log cabin blanket recipe to write about, promptly forgot about it and a couple of weeks later started knitting a log cabin blanket using all my pink yarn.

It might stay pink if it makes it to baby blanket sized, or I might add in some pastel green and blue, too, to make a bigger blanket. We’ll see. I’m also holding several strands of yarn together to make a kind of bulky yarn, which means it’s deeply satisfying how much yarn is used even as the project is still relatively small.

In Kristen Finlay’s version, DK weight yarn scraps (or fingering/sock yarn held double) are used to make a simple scrappy log cabin blanket that’s lighter weight than my version. Log cabin is a great technique for knitters of any skill level because it’s worked in garter stitch. The only not completely basic technique you need for log cabin knitting is picking up stitches.

If you’ve never worked a log cabin knitting project before, this is a good introduction, and it is really nice to use all your yarn scraps in one big project you’ll use for years to come.

If you use a lot of DK weight yarn you can keep building on it whenever you finish a project, or if you use more worsted weight you can do the same thing with it, it will just be a little bigger starting out than the pattern calls for. How big it gets is totally up to you.

I have really been enjoying working on my log cabin project, and it’s my current sitting at my desk and need a break knit (do you have one of those or is it just me?).

Ready to start your own log cabin blanket knitting project? You can grab the free pattern from Kristen Finlay on Ravelry.

Need more log cabin inspiration? Check out more log cabin knitting patterns.

[Photo: Kristen Finlay]

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