Olio

I have a various things to say. The first thing to say is that I used my knitted shopping bag for the first time this evening at Walgreens. I have been frustrated by shopping bags for years. I re-use paper bags at the grocery store, but when I don't bring enough to sack all the things I buy, I end up with plastic bags. We use a few plastic bags for our trash cans every week. The surplus bags go in a nifty dispenser tube sewn from a kitchen towel and eyelet trim that Mr. GAIN's dad commissioned Mr. GAIN's aunt to make.

The check out gal was surprised at how "expandable" (her word) my bag is. I am happy that I didn't have to take multiple plastic shopping bags home. And my bag didn't rip from the corners of the many cardboard boxes that I bought. My bag has a big advantage over a plastic bag.

Throwing empty plastic shopping bags out in the trash seems like a waste of a bag. Maybe twice a year we'll take surplus bags down to a food pantry run by Catholic Charities. I cannot imagine taking food home without a bag. Despite our "donation," I think the plastic bags multiply in their dispenser tube in my closet! We always get more from someplace -- argh! I may have to go deeper into this issue. I really liked not having the plastic around. My house felt beautifully free of extra junk when I unloaded from my shopping tonight.

The second thing I have to say is:
We had over 6" of rain in the gauge at 10:30 a.m. !!! It rained after that, too. We have water in the basement for the second time in our nine years here, so that tells you how saturated the ground is.

The third thing I have to say is that I finally took time to reflect on the death of an acquaintance today. She was a home school mom that I met soon after moving to Des Moines. A car hit her and she died instantly. She is survived by three daughters, a husband, and her parents and siblings. I haven't been to park day in so long that I don't know if she would even remember my name. But I certainly remember her. After the sadness kind of went away, I concluded that I should strive to be more like she was. The world could be awesome if we could all be more selfless, giving, friendly, caring, and positive.

Lion Brand Shopping Bag

I finished the knitted shopping bag a while ago. Here it is sideways. Yes, I am too lazy to rotate it, and I am at the wrong computer to do that anyway. I think it will be a useful bag for the beach. Sand, be gone! Stuff, stay in!

Review: It's pretty quick to make. The band is HUGE and takes a while, but not too bad. It was designed well and I appreciate that it won't theoretically rip out at the bottom. I twisted my band, but that is OK. Now I know how to tell it apart from other bags -- look for the imperfection. (Just like rug weavings!) Seaming up the sides is fairly annoying where the mesh meets the band. I ended up using a hand stitch technique that people use for sewing snaps and hook-and-eye's to garments. I also had trouble deciding if I wanted the seam to be smooth on the outside or inside, and which side I wanted to be the outside (the public side). Overall, the knitting was great. I just suck at making decisions.

Currently on the sticks: King Charles brocade dish cloth for myself using the leftover shopping bag yarn.

Outdoor Crafting

I'll share two projects from last week. We had a lot of time to craft while Mr. GAIN was out of town. Tuesday night, I suggested that the kids go outside to play after dinner. "A" of GAIN chose two activities and two of her siblings thought they would go along with her decisions -- making a snow fort followed by making no-bake cookies. A great way to celebrate a good snow. This was big, outdoor crafting.

You can see "N" of GAIN helping her in the photo. He would "harvest" the snow from the side yard, then "I" and "A" would fill their buckets with it. "A" performed all the construction, placing each snow "brick" in its place, making a fort with plenty of room for everyone involved in its construction.

I decided that my craft would be a knit shopping bag. I had looked at many knitting patterns for something like this in the past year. I chose Lion Brand's shopping bag simply because I knew that I could find the yarn quickly.

One pattern that I liked called for hemp yarn. Can I find hemp yarn quickly? Not in the big box stores. I just haven't had the best luck with small, local yarn stores. Two have closed in the last year or two, and I didn't like the service at one of them at all. So I went with a mainstream pattern and a large chain store for supplies. Sorry, Creative Corner. I just don't drive in your neighborhood very much.

How about those huge size 17 needles? The handle is going very slowly; the bag goes very fast. the handle contains over 200 stitches on size 8 needles. The picture here shows part of my first evening's progress, pre-handle. I hope to be finished by the end of this week. Families attending Game Day saw me working on this last Thursday. My aim is completing the handle by next Game Day.

I did change something (of course) on the model bag -- the yarn is Lion Cotton, in Sage and Natural. The brand promotes its new organic cotton yarn in colors vanilla and bark. My color scheme needs a little more oomph than brown and tan. My colors are still muted and not screaming, but not brown. I kept thinking of uses for this bag's leftover yarn. If I end up with leftover handle yarn, well, a brown dishrag doesn't leave me with a good feeling.

Being the suspicious person that I am, I asked the company if its yarn was organically grown cotton; just natural, un-dyed cotton; or cotton dyed with natural colorings. I was very suspicious after reading that less than 1% of cotton is grown organically here and in family-type magazine (maybe Family Fun, but I can't find a link to the table I remember seeing. I kind of doubt Family Fun, being Disney-produced and me being suspicious). The reply was that it was grown organically. Unsure of the source -- American or overseas. The reply wasn't the friendliest or informative -- "just the facts, ma'am."