Gifts of a baby blanket and body bits

Oh, my, what a lot of things to tell you!

Firstly, I want to show off this baby blanket that Sally and her coworkers made. A year ago, Sally was a lapsed knitter, who rediscovered the thrill when she contributed to the afghan we made for our school. First she made a bunch of squares for that, and then at the sewing-up party we gave out lootbags containing a couple of balls of yarn (that's called "redistribution of stash around the neighbourhood") and she went off and made a great scarf. So now she is roaring along, probably trying to figure out how to knit and ride a bike at the same time. I hear the gang is making another afghan at school this year, too!

Another person involved in the school afghan was Beryl, who now has this business. A breast cancer survivor herself, she knits breasts for women who have had mastectomies. She makes everyday ones in cotton, special occasion ones with eyelash trim, cashmere ones, plain ones, fancy ones, big ones and small ones. She also has a pattern on knitty.com to knit your own breast, if need be. Check it out!

And more body parts: I recently learned that our neighbour John was in hospital to have a kidney removed. He was perfectly healthy and fine, and was donating his kidney to someone who wasn't! You can read about it here and here, and they are blogging the whole thing here. Sign those organ donor cards!


And what have I been up to? Well, yesterday I had a bit of time between haircut and school pick-up (oh, must take a picture of my new do!) and so was browsing the charity shops (thrift stores, for the non-English) and found a nice lot of straight knitting needles (all with red bits, as it turns out) which look very lovely in my jam jar on the table, and a whole load of old pattern pamphlets, for 10p each. Unfortunately yarn that appears in these shops disappears very fast!
I took pictures of a lot of them, but Blogger is being very slow and uncooperative this morning, so I shall leave you with this gem and save others for later.

And a late addition: The pictures of the Knitted Wedding are up on the Cast-Off site. I'm in this one, if you look very carefully at the crowd directly behind the bride. Black shirt, blue flowery headband, next to Katherine in pale blue. A bit lame, isn't it, to search oneself out in a group photo like this? And in this one, you can see the little ring pillow I made for the affair. Not wedding coloured at all... but it was fun to make. Thanks to Kay for pointing this out!