from Zayre's to Auntie Viola

Remember that yarn I mentioned last week, the skeins I'd get on sale at Murphy Mart or Zayre's when I was a kid and I'd make them into toy clowns for sale? Well, some of that yarn has been with me for all these years, and a bunch was added when my Gram cleared stuff out of her big house and moved to her apartment a few years ago. The last time I used it was to make an afghan to donate through a group a couple of years ago. Leah has used lots of it as she became more proficient at crocheting and then knitting. But lately, we've both moved on to different kinds of yarn and the acrylic stash was virtually abandoned.

Then came a post on a Freecycle-like group (swap/sell/barter/borrow/give/request) that I thought of a couple of months ago and has recently gotten underway, thanks to an enthusiastic volunteer who moderates the group. The message was from a local homeschooling family, requesting yarn for their 88-year-old great aunt, who keeps her hands busy with making items to be raffled as fundraisers.

Well, I talked to Leah about it and we agreed that we're happy to send our unused stash to Auntie Viola in Rhode Island. When I originally responded to the person requesting the yarn, I told her I probably had 40+ skeins to offer, but it ended up being much more than that -- two big boxes full to overflowing! Yahoo in so many ways -- cleared out our yarn closet, helped a fellow stitchaholic, and set some good karma in motion so maybe someday when we're in need of yarn, it'll come our way from an unexpected source. :-)

And remember how I said the Goob was all atwitter about the idea of morphing t-shirts, as shown in the Generation T book a friend has and offered to loan to us? Well, sho' 'nuf, when I came home with the book on Friday night, Leah took it into her bedroom to devour. When she emerged in the morning, she had marked her intended projects with paper scraps...
This busy little beaver wasted no time. The very next morning, she chose a project, grabbed the freebie shirt from a baseball game earlier this summer, pulled out the red sleeves we saved from Jesse's Renaissance Faire squire tunic, and set to work. She learned some new sewing terms and techniques along the way, removing the usual t-shirt sleeves and adding some flouncy red ruffled cap sleeves.
Meanwhile, Jesse built a k'nex fishing rod with all the working features of a usual rod, including a trigger release casting mechanism. Not only that, the thing telescopes so it can be collapsed to half its length for easier transport! He and Scott went fishing last night and this rod performed beautifully. Unfortunately, Scott didn't take the camera. I know Jesse was planning to make some modifications to his fishing rod last night, though, so I have a feeling we'll get more opportunities to photograph his creation. And maybe we'll be having fish for dinner!