60 Hats

My informal goal was to knit 60 hats in April, I normally try for 30 hats in 30 days. That would be an average of 2 hand knit hats a day.  Today is April 8th and I only have 13 hats that I term are ready to tag and bag.  A hat is finished,except for washing instructions and rows counted for the 1 million row challenge on Raverly. 

I am doing this for two reasons this year. The first is that I just don't see the improvement in the local economy as the politicians are touting.  There is still an escalation in the demand for services like our local food and diaper banks.  The second reason is, because of the first reason more groups are asking for hats and other winter items.  I normally only knit for 2  groups. I can only knit so much.  I average between 11 and 13 dozen hand knit hats per winter.  Yes I start knitting them in the spring.  I am wondering if I should try to knit more hats to help more kids or hope that some else takes up some of the slack. Yes I know that knitting between 143 and 156 hats, is a lot of hats, but I don't think it even makes a dent in the need.  I just have this need to make the world a better place for the kids. At the same time I have things I want to knit for myself too.  I wonder if I will ever find a balance in life?

On the health front, I am starting to feel better.  Somewhere around 5 pm, the sore throat just seemed to hurt less.  Dinner went down very easy too.  I still think I will give it a day or 2 before I head back to the gym though. I also think that I will call it a night.  

The Day of a Sick Mom

Ok, so I am very grumpy, as this is day 2 of the bug and my tummy is still yucky. In addition my throat also hurts. So this is what my day looks like when I am sick on the second day. 

1. Drive and drop off Eric at his day program.  

2.  Start Roomba off in any given room.  

3.  Gather, sort , prioritize, then start the laundry. It is nearing knee high because I skipped yesterday.  

4.  Start the dishwasher and do the dishes in the sink.  John, can empty the dishwasher later. 

5.  Make a cuppa tea and rest for a bit. 

6. Knit hats, because I don't have the energy to do anything else. I can also knit a basic hat in my sleep. 

7.  Pick up Eric from his day program. 

8.  Watch PBS Kids with Eric until his aide comes. 

9.  I put John in charge of dinner before he left for work, so I can skip cooking dinner tonight. 

10. Help get Eric ready for bed. Tell him he can not have a good night kiss because mommy is still sick and watch him pout.  

11. Hope I get a good nights sleep knowing that I hit day 2 of the cold because my body was back in kilter.  Also knowing that this cold will cause a flare up and that there is nothing that can be done about it.  This is the reason I hate my own body sometimes. 

Time for more rest and tea.  I promise that if I am feeling better tomorrow, I won't be so grumpy.  

I Got Sick

I landed up with the latest tummy bug that was going around.  This basically meant that I was up half the night and did not get any laundry done.  The only thing that got done was knitting 3 more hats for next winter to bring the total for the month to 11 hats finished.  I have not made much of a dent in my yarn stash either.  

Basically the house falls apart when I get sick.  So tomorrow is pay back time. A lot of laundry and other stuff to do. 

Spring Knitting

Well it is spring. It is time to start next winters batch of hats. I have 8 hats, of the first dozen completed. With 2 more on the needles, different sizes on the needles of course.  I hope I can knit a bakers dozen of a dozen hats.  13 dozen hats sounds like a good number of hats to me.

Of course I will throw in some other winter things like scarfs and ponchos too. What are you knitting up for those who could use a little extra help next winter?  You don't have to knit as many things as I do.  I just tend to go overboard on some projects.  I just have a need to repair the world. After all we are all in this world together.

Enjoy you families and our mostly nice spring weather.

The Darkside of Copyright Infringement

Here in Tucson we are losing a second local yarn shop this year and it is only April. As with any small business, every sale makes a difference towards the bottom line. Even though the prices seem higher than the large craft retailer down the street, in actually your local yarn shops carry a wide selection and better quality of yarn. They also provide help to get you through the hard part of the patterns you are working on, just try to get that help at a big box store.  They provide classes to teach you new techniques. They also carry a wide variety of books and patterns. Since they do not have 100's of stores, they can not get a volume discount.

I am going to be focusing on the books and patterns in this blog post. For the sake of speed, I am going to assume that you all know what a copyright is and how long it is good for. If not I will refer you to The Copyright Office in Washington D.C.. If you are not in the United States, your country should have the equivalent legal body. I would also like to state that this is not legal advice since I am not a lawyer. This is written from the point of view of a consumer and a pattern designer of which I am.

Your local yarn shop relays on knitwear designers and authors of knitting books and patterns that you use for your projects. They gladly carry all of these items for you to buy. No, it is not OK to ask that they photocopy the pattern from a book or that you copy the pattern down in your pattern note book. After all these patterns help to sell the yarn that they carry.

Now here is where we come in as a consumer.  This is where a lot of knitters fail their local yarn shops and designers. They buy one copy of the pattern that they want to knit. After they knit the item their friends want to knit it too. So, instead of referring their friends to the yarn shop where they went,  they go ahead and make photocopies and freely distribute the patterns. Technically you just broke the law, although copyright does let you make photocopies of the items you buy for personal use, giving the pattern away is not personal use.

To put it another way if you bought the pattern for lets say $5.00 ( I like easy math) and then gave that pattern to 10 friends. Your local yarn shop had $5.00 in sales and the pattern designer got money for the sale of 1 pattern.  If you instead did the right thing and sent those friends to the yarn store and they each bought the pattern for $5.00, your local yarn store would have $55.00 in sales and the possibility of additional sales of supplies and the pattern designer would get their rightful share of the use of their pattern.

Depending on the location of the yarn shop, the monthly rent is upward of $1,000 or more per month. Add the cost of utilities, wages of employees and other business expenses, you can see that it takes a lot in sales to run a business. This is before the owner even draws a salary.

Depending on the pattern it can take upwards of 1 month to write, test and knit a sample of the pattern that you are using assuming 6 to 8 hour work days. It takes anywhere from 6 months to a year to get a pattern book out. If the pattern is from an indie designer they  will get about 40% of the sale price of the pattern. If you buy a knitting book, the author will get between 4 and 10% of the wholesale price, with most authors getting 4 cents on the wholesale dollar for every book that they sell. So for a $25.00 book the author gets about $.50. unless they self publish.

So what I want to know is, if you want to have local yarn stores  and designers in your communities and are willing to pay the price to keep those small business running? Are you willing to send your friends into your local yarn store to buy the pattern that they want to knit? Or can you say, that I personally help close another local yarn store by buying 1 copy of a pattern and making copies of that pattern to freely distribute? The choice is always yours.

Busy with a Chance of Knitting

My guess last night, that Eric would be home sick today was spot on. Eric was running a fever all day long and it seemed to get higher as the day wore on. I am really hoping it was do to the family outing on Sunday and not the really bad cold that is going around his day program. He was cranky all day and wanted me close by all day.

So my day consisted of catching up on laundry, a little picking up around the house and lots and lots of knitting. I started out the day on size 6 knitting needles working on the stripes of a hat. Then when I got tired of that I went to size 7 knitting needles and worked on a poncho, 1.5 inches later it was time to switch things up. So I went to size 10.5 knitting needles. I started 3 hats and finished 2 of them. This was more my speed today. I wanted to finish things fast. For some reason I just need to get things finished quickly when I am sitting with Eric all day. I need to feel that I have accomplished something besides sitting all day.  I also took the time to weave in the ends of another hat.

I don't have a row count yet. I just threw all the freshly knitted items into a laundry basket to be tagged and counted at a later date. If worst comes to worst, I will count all the rows when the laundry basket is full.

Well it looks like Eric is going to be home tomorrow too, so I think it is time to call it a day.

More knitting

Today I got more knitting done. I finished knitting another hat, but still have to weave in the ends tomorrow.  I also made progress on a poncho. I might get more knitting done with the bad allergy season we are having here in Arizona.  I think it might have something to do with all the rain we had this winter.   

I have a question for every one.  Does anyone else walk and knit at the same time,like I do? Nothing crazy hard like lace.  Just washcloths and hats.  

This is today's hat.