Knitting for charities is nothing new. Whether it’s for saving penguins from oil spills or warming up homeless folks or to help prevent shaken baby syndrome, if you want to put your needles (or hook) to work at helping others you can do it.

My current project is a Golden Orchids shawl that I will donate to a silent auction benefiting a local organization called Life Styles that helps adults with disabilities train for jobs and work in the community. A good friend that serves as their Director of Development asked me to knit something to donate. I felt like this shawl would be a good fit.

So far Golden Orchids is a pleasurable knit. I’m using Cloudborn Fiber Merino Superwash Sock in Autumn Heather. Some of the charts are slightly too small for my taste, but they had to be printed that way to fit on the page. I always mean to buy one of those chart holders that has a magnetic strip you can move for each row, but some of these center charts are too small for that to really be helpful.The pattern is free, popular, and so far seems to be free of errors. Many people on Ravelry mentioned that this ended up on the small side, but personally my favorite shawls are more like warm neck decorations rather than mini-blankets. I still have three charts to go, so I’ll see how it ends up.

My knitting time is soooo divided these days. I want to be able to work on everything all at once. I have one foot in fall and one in summer as I trade off between Vasa and the finally-out-of-time-out Flaum, which caused me much grief last spring (solely due to user error). Flaum is winning out most of the time due to the bouncy merino content. I just can’t choose one, so I knit Flaum when at home and keep Vasa in my purse as it’s small and light. More on those soon!

Interested in charitable knitting? Just google “knitting for charity” or check out some ideas in this article.

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