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Woman Arrested after Knit in at Gas Company

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women knit in vermont protestA woman was arrested last week in Vermont after five women staged a knit in at a local gas company. Jane Palmer of Monkton was arrested after refusing to leave Vermont Gas Systems’ waiting room. The women were protesting a pipeline proposed for their area that would cross her property.

The women said they wanted the company to admit to illegally entering people’s property and to using eminent domain to seize private land for the pipeline with attempting negotiations with landowners. When the women were asked to leave, they pulled out their knitting and continued to talk to Eileen Simollardes, the utility’s vice president of project expansion, and others.

When the women refused to leave at the end of the business day, a reported five police cars came and Palmer was arrested.

Another protester, Mary Martin, said the group has become “reluctant activists” because the company will not deal with them in any other way.

The NPR report said Palmer was knitting a turquoise scarf at the time of her arrest. Palmer is the one in the floral dress in the above picture.

If you want to see more about this strange story, check out a 12-minute video on the Burlington Free Press website.

[Photo via Burlington Free Press.]

Comments

  2. Not at all strange. Just 5 amazing ladies making themselves heard. Good for them, I wish them success in their campaign.

Have you read?

Knit a Log Cabin Blanket with All Your Scraps

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]