Warm Up America Wants You to Stitch Your State

June 21, 2016 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

Warm Up America is a fabulous charitable organization that encourages people to knit or crochet and assemble blankets or other items that can be donated locally or given to the national organization to be distributed where they are needed.

But now they’re asking knitters and crocheters to help with a different kind of project: a banner that will be displayed at trade shows and used in advertising.

Warm Up America goes to events like Stitches and Vogue Knitting Live to raise awareness of its programs, and it wants to show that its knitters come from across the country with the Stitch Your State campaign.

Interested knitters are asked to create a 7 by 9 inch block that has something to do with their state. It could include the name or shape of the state in stitching, a state bird or flower, or anything else you want that represents your state.

Register to become part of the challenge (there’s a link at the page linked above) and send in your submission along with the submission form by Sept. 5. One design from each state will be chosen during the week of Sept. 19 to be part of the banner. Selected blocks will be shared on social media and the finished banner will be used in advertising, at trade shows and on display at the Warm Up America office.

This sounds like such a fun challenge. I’d love to know if any of you enter.

[Photo via Warm Up America.]

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Practice Your Brioche Knitting with the Folgate Set

Brioche knitting, also sometimes known as English rib, is a popular way to add a lot of texture to knitting projects. It can be a little intimidating when you’ve never done it before, but once you get the technique down it’s lots of fun to do. And it creates the squishiest, warmest fabric, so it’s great for fall and winter accessories like these.

Mirella Moments has a whole collection of English rib knitting patterns, including the hat pictured here, a headband and an infinity scarf.

These would be super as gifts to knit now and have on hand for the holidays. You can knit all three and give them to three different people, or gift them all to one person, or keep them for yourself. No one is judging here.

All of the projects use worsted weight yarn but they come out looking chunky because of the knitting technique, which involves yarn overs that are worked together with the next stitch on the next round so there’s not a visible hole, it just makes the fabric really stretchy.

You can practice working the stitch flat if you like, but it’s not any more difficult to do in the round. If you’ve never done it before you might want to start with the headband pattern here before moving on to a bigger project.

The hat and the headband both come in three sizes for adults (the small would probably work for a teen) and the infinity scarf is one size but you could adjust it to be bigger or smaller if you like.

These projects are so pretty and relatively easy to do, too, even if you’ve never worked brioche before.

You can find all the patterns, complete with photo tutorials, at Mirella Moments: hat | headband | infinity scarf.

[Photo: Mirella Moments]

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