Warm Hands, Warm Heart

Last year I took a good look at my yarn stash.  I have quite a bit of yarn.  Ok, all jokes and sarcasm aside, I have a lot of yarn.  So why not do something with it to help people?  There are people, kids especially out there in New England that go cold in the winter, because there's no hats, mittens or scarves.  I can't stand seeing  a kid in the dead of a Massachusetts winter, with no mittens or hat, it makes me sad on a level that's tough to describe.  You can always tell the kids that don't have mittens from the ones that refuse to wear them, too.

I love a good challenge.  So I made up my own charity challenge:  To see how many pairs of mittens I could knit in a year's time.  One Rule:  I could not buy yarn to make any of these mittens.  Every single pair is made from scraps from another project, single skeins of wool that I already had, or yarn that was given to me in a "de-stashing" event.  My knitting group has a "destash night" every year in May, where we bring in stuff we no longer want or need.  I came home with a nice little bag of wools and acrylics, with the intention of making mittens, a scarf and perhaps a hat or two for charity.

This was fun, and mittens don't take a lot of time.  I can whip out a pair in about two hours, which is actually kind of slow.  They fit nicely in between projects, too.  And here's thirty-six kids that will have warm hands this winter!