Knitting for Peace and dementia

Nelson Knit-out in the Park (Photo credit: Grant Neufeld)

As my regular readers know I spend a lot of my time knitting. I do this because it helps exercise my arthritic fingers and keeps them supple and also because I am really bad at keeping my hands still when watching TV and sometimes even reading,….

So the next thing is – what do I do with all this knitting? It is quite good now, and in fact is better these days than a few years ago, but not as good as when I used to knit for myself and my children. Due to the arthritis the tension is far from perfect, so I need a charity outlet. I found through the Internet that there is a charity called Knitting For Peace. And so I knit for them.

Below is a photo of some of the things I have recently knitted for them whilst on my holiday in Scotland. As you can see from some of the patterns I have shown, I have used some vintage patterns which my mother-in-law passed onto to me. The issue with these patterns – demonstrated by the hooded coat in front – is that babies were clearly much smaller and thus you need to size up quite a bit – say 2 sizes – to fit current babies. but they are very pretty designs.

Knitting from Scotland

There are also some blankets there that I crocheted in the round – I can only do very simple crochet and in fact, the grandkids were helping me with this whilst we were together this week. They can undertake the simple simple chain. I shall be teaching them to knit properly as soon as they have the concentration, in the meantime they ‘help’.

The blankets are in response to the newsletter from the charity, which I am reproducing below. Do note that the link the to pattern they offer didn’t work for me, which was disappointing I thought. I found some lovely hand painted buttons in wood whilst in Scotland and have put some of those on the green and yellow and white cardi.

Anyway, if any of you feel inspired to do some knitting for charity, they would be very pleased indeed, as you can see, to received the knitted goods and the blankets made from squares would be a lovely group project to undertake – teachers please note…! So, I shall carry on knitting jumpers are next on my list, plus some baby booties and mittens. I knitted some dolls clothes – I thought – a while back, and they sent me a lovely note saying they had gone to preemie babies, which I thought was wonderful, so even a small amount of wool, can be usefully knitted up.