knit your bit

Leah's in an American Girl Club. Every six weeks or so, she gets together with 15 girls to do activities reflecting the time period for the designated doll of that session. This time, it was Molly and World War II. In one of the Molly books (which all the girls read like crazy in preparation for the meeting), Molly and her classmates get together to "knit their bit" and contribute to the war effort. There's mention of socks and squares for a blanket and a knitting bee. We were talking about the story at dinnertime one night and that led to talking about how plenty of charity knitting still goes on. I reminded Leah about the bear she made for the Mother Bear Project, the hats we've donated to Dulaan Project, the volunteer time we spent at the Spa Knit and Spin greeter table to benefit the Ships Project, and the (pre-blog) blankets we made for Project Linus. And that led to more talk of philanthropy on a small scale and how good it feels to do something kind for others, examples of which included the children's room sound system at our library, purchased with donations when my dad died, and the many, many books that were purchased at the library with donations made in memory of Scott's Aunt Alice Sweetland. We don't know how many books this was, but we do know they're really good books, as we come across them frequently in our rotating library stash, denoted by bookplates with her name on them.

So anyway, Leah decided she wanted to knit something for a soldier or a veteran. I let my fingers do the walking and came up with a current day Knit Your Bit program through the National World War II Museum. We rummaged around in the yarn stash and dug up a free pattern for the Irish Hiking Scarf, and she set to work.

Leah learned how to do cables and loves the technique. She cranked out this much scarf in a little more than a day (with a big break in there for a park date with friends) so she could tell about this portion of the story and her actions as a result during the show-and-tell portion of American Girl Club. It ends up that most of the girls there know how to knit, so she also gave them each a piece of paper with info about the above charity knitting groups.

Today I was going to take a picture of the illustration in the book that shows the American Girl characters gathered for their knitting bee, but then I realized posting that here is probably not kosher with copyright laws. As I closed the book, a bookplate on the front page caught my eye...