Stitch with Sweets to Support Warm Up America

The Hallmark Channel and Warm Up America have teamed up with Stitched with Sweets to provide fun and warm Christmas scarves to women’s shelters.

As part of their Countdown to Christmas, The Hallmark Channel has donate $10,000 to the initiative and is encouraging knitters and crocheters to stitch festive scarves in their holiday color palette to donate to Warm Up America, which will distribute them to shelters.

Cozy up with your favorite story about a woman who decides to leave her life in the big city behind to marry the owner of the Christmas tree farm (isn’t that what they’re all about?) and stitch up some fun hot chocolate mugs and holiday sweets to make into scarves to donate.

The original pattern was designed for crochet by Twinkie Chan, master of food-related crochet. (I’ve made her crochet doughnut rattle a couple of times.) Candace O. adapted the pattern for knitters.

It’s patchwork based so you can make a bunch of pieces and sew them together, or you could alternate different designs in one long piece and add appliques when the the knitting is done. There are options for hot chocolate mugs worked in garter stitch or ribbing, with hears and candy canes you can applique to the mugs. There’s are also rectangular panels with designs inspired by candy canes, ribbon candy and peppermint bark, as well as a bobble-covered piece meant to evoke marshmallows.

The image above shows the crocheted version because there’s not a full knit scarf on their website. But if you want to crochet it, there’s also a video tutorial on the website showing how to work the pieces.

Both the knit and crochet patterns are available from Warm Up America. There you will also find the address to send completed scarves or patches that they can sew up on their end. There’s no deadline mentioned, but check that page for more details before you donate.

Also check out their current needs page on their website to learn about other things you can make to donate.

[Photo via Warm Up America]

Knitting and travel are two hobbies that are highly compatible. Travel often involves waiting or time spent on planes, trains, boats, etc., time that can easily be filled by knitting, a portable and productive craft you can do most anywhere (and yes, you can take your knitting on a plane most of the time).

Krista Ann combines knitting and traveling regularly and ended up visiting every continent in 2022 with her knitting needles along for the ride. The Wandering Knitter explores travel, knitting and learning new knitting skills no matter where you are.

This isn’t a book for beginners, but if you’ve wanted to learn techniques like brioche, cables, lace, colorwork, mitered squares and short rows, there’s a set of more beginner level patterns followed by ones that are bigger, more detailed or required a little more skill. For example a brioche washcloth is the beginner pattern, while a brioche sweater (with unexplained exceptionally long sleeves) is the stepped up project. A basic mesh lace scarf becomes a more complex lace kerchief. A giant mitered square cowl graduates to a mitered square tote bag.

Interspersed among the patterns are essays about traveling to different continents and what she saw there. There are also tips for traveling with your knitting and tips for reading charts, but no tutorials for knitting skills (other than a written explanation of how mosaic knitting works).

Some of the projects would be useful to have when traveling, such as fingerless gloves, a warm headband or a colorwork hat. The travel angle is an interesting hook for a book, but I would have enjoyed essays more about specific incidents or shopping for yarn in a different country or something more than the general essays about things she’s liked and places she’d like to go back to.

Still, if you’re looking for a skill building book that doesn’t focus on the basics but gives you some wearable, attractive accessories, this book is a good one to check out. Just maybe make the sleeves shorter if you knit the sweater.

About the book: 128 pages, paperback, 20 patterns. Published 2026 by Quarry Books. Suggested retail price $24.99.

Have you read?