One cookie at a time

I was watching MSNBC this morning and just happened to catch the story on the number one cookie seller for the Girl Scouts this year.

She sold over 17,000 boxes of cookies and earned her troop $21,000! Actually over $21,000 ... I wonder what they will do with the money? They could use it to pay for the upping of all the girls. They could use it to send every girl to summer camp. they could use it to buy camping gear for the troop (although I don't know what happens after the troop disolves).

Our problem is timing. If we could move the date for selling closer to when we sell corn it would be so much better for sells ... then we can get 100's of boxes sold. But corn time is Aug/sept and cookies are Jan/feb in our parts.

But i guess if the girls sold that much I would really have an issue because it is a real pain to sort all those cookies and make sure everyone has what they are supposed to.

Sugar & Cream and one really good kid!

Okay so my daughter, the one with bad grades who is really getting herself into dutch with them, has decided that she needs to do some charity work. She joined a school group, or is that a group thru school? Not sure which came first really....called Key Club.

Basically they do a lot of community service projects and it goes hand-in-hand with her work in Girl Scouts....but mostly she does it because its just great fun!

Anyways they got together a pretty informal group to knit & crochet bandages for lepers and emergency bandages for the soldiers over seas. Its a simple pattern that calls for worsted weight cotton yarn, and each bandage needs to be a continuous strip of at least 4 ftX4inches....well I'm not sure a regular ball would go that far, but I figured with all my S&C balls I could give up one--I've got SO much.

But wouldn't you know it--not a single ball of white, natural, or ecru! Not a one...oh I've got white with the tinsel wrap, and the ecru with the color blots, and the natural with the tweed look...but it has to be the plain stuff so the dyes won't interact with wounds or meds.

So I went online to see what I could find, decided if I was going to have to buy it the 1lb cone was the way to go--she could make it for as long as she wanted to without worrying about running out in the middle of the bandage....herrschners.com wanted $14, marymaxim.com wanted $13.oo, anniesattic.com didn't have any coned cotton at all that I could find...on a whim I called Walmart--they had it, lots of it, for less than $7/lb!!!!

I got two of white, one of ecru. Tried to get a discount since it was for charity, but they wouldn't go for it...I did get to brag a bit about my daughter though!

They also have a pattern that uses the size 10 bedspread cotton with the smaller needles/hooks but she said she isn't ready to work with anything that thin....I would think the bandages would be the perfect way to get started with it myself--but I'm not pushing.

Its a really nice thing she's doing and I want it to stay fun for her.

Oh I bet some of you want the pattern? Its simple:

Size US8 or US9 needles, worsted weight cotton (undyed, no color)

Cast on enough stitches to make the rows betweend 3-4" in width (swatch it out if you need to....daughter is getting about 4 stitchs to the inch)

Row 1:knit across

Row2: repeat row 1

Repeat until bandage is about 4ft long. Cut and weave in ends.
Roll the bandages up.

They will use a guaze on the wound and then use the bandages to hold the guaze in place...they also use them like ace bandages.

They like the knitted/crocheted bandages because they can stand to repeated washings....can be boiled and treated with sanitizers...and then re-used.

Home Sweet Home

I am so glad to be home. I enjoy going on vacation but it is always nice to get home to my full stash, um, I mean, my own bed.

We had 10 days of pure work work work. We got up on a Friday and the work didn't stop until Monday after the reunion, my mother-in-laws family reunion. I doubt there will ever be a reunion on my FIL side or even on my own parents side....which I think is really sad, but that's the fact of life.

I will try to write more personal stuff over on my yahoo blog because I have some major gossiping to do and this isn't the place to do it, the private blog is.

I did get some stitching accomplished:

I finally finished the first sock for my daughter, now the second sock will have to wait for me to finish my HSS partners socks...I am kind of disappointed with the way they turned out actually. I messed up the pick up stitches on my gusset and now I have some pretty big ventilation holes there...oh well...it is also the first time I've done a tailored sock so I was having some problems with double increases/decreases...I also got interupted so often that I had made one section too long and the other section too short.

So after I take a break from them and work on my partners socks (using a pattern type I'm used to) I will be comtemplating whether I will let the sock stand as it is now or make a new sock ripping out the stitches from the old sock as I go.

But I will wait....I may even wait until after I finish my daughters brownie socks, even though I was planning on them using the same pattern. I did find however that each sock takes one ball of Bernat Sox yarn...or about 1.75 ounces...50 grams....203 yards....186 meters.

so I was right in buying two skeins of yarn in each color. I found some hair binders at walmart while on vacation that will match them wonderfully!

I even had time to knit up something special for my partner using pearle cotton and size 0 needles...I will probably make another for her using even smaller needles but not until the kids start school so I will be nearly uninterupted, and I can put on three pairs of magnifying glasses w/o worry of being picked on.

I feel kind of bad because I came back from vacation and found that there have been some trivia questions going on the HSS2 blog that I've missed and let my house down on...time to pull out those books and keep them close to the computer I see.

Actually it reminds me alot of the trivia contests we used to have on the WB HPbbs...one person would ask a question and then whoever answered it would ask the next one, the moderator would decide the difficulty of each question and award points...only this time only McGonagall will ask the questions. Either way I've found it is helpful to keep the books handy...along with the URL for the HP lexicon!

Well football is coming on in about...ewww, NOW! Got to go.

Go Vikes!! I bleed purple.

New Stash Arrivals-2007Jul8-14, part4

This is actually my biggest weakness when it comes to sock yarn these days....Brownie Socks. My youngest is a Brownie scout (entering her second year) and I just refuse to pay the prices they want for the extended uniform parts. I know it goes to support the cause, but still I just can not bring myself to pay $5 a pair that she will just out grow and I can't recycle the yarn. At least if I make them myself I can "unstitch" them and then make them to fit her leg & foot again using the same yarn! AND each pair will only have cost me....get this....$1.94 with the Starlette Chocolate, and $3.98 with the Mellowspun Camel & Cocoa! And depending on how well they work up, I may even get two pair out of each....we will have to see. Both yarns are available at Mary Maxim's online.

I can't find a pattern online yet for the official Brownie pattern, but I don't think anyone in her troop will grimace if I find something close (currently the online GSA catalog are out of stock of them and they don't know when they will be coming in... So making is my only other option...the local store didn't have any either).
Well, that's it for stash adds for now! More next week....yep, more!
I've heard of ladies going on "yarn diets"....but remember....as Richard Simmon says "the first three letters in the word diet spell the word DIE!"