From the day I was told I would have this surgery, I told Dr. S, I started knitting.

But the first thing yesterday was a young nurse who came in and asked me a set number of questions. One was standard for patients who’ve had a resection, but there was no resection done here–I laughed, answering, “Don’t have the body parts for that anymore!”

She clearly felt put on the spot. I remember being young and intimidated by older people (wait–older? Hey!…)  My heart went out to her–it’s okay!  Certainly not something to worry over.

The surgeon was running late and I made him much later. I didn’t want to miss anybody. The more he saw what I’d done as I pulled things out of my bag, the happier he got about the whole thing too.  I couldn’t remember everybody’s names; I’m not great at learning new information when I’m drugged out in the hospital.  I had individual projects in ziploc bags, a card to each, but in some, they were still waiting for the names to be added.  Dear (blank).

He helped by looking up my records and scanning down the screen for me, trying not to miss anybody either. I explained I was on my way to E ward after that to go see the nurses.

You know, he could have thought of his schedule and gotten annoyed at my hijacking his time. Instead, the grin on his face just kept getting bigger and bigger as I pulled out one  after another–let’s see, got Dr. X, Y, and Z here, what was the name of? And…? Anyone else?

“Oh, that’s COOL!” to the piano-pattern hat.  He described exactly the intended recipient I was thinking of, and said, “Oh, that’s Lionel.”

I looked at him, cracking up: “I can NOT call him Lionel. What was his *name*?”

Oh. Right. Dr…

And another–he spelled it out but I just wasn’t getting it. With a high-frequency loss, V, C, T, G and the like all sound like the vowel E: no consonant sounds need apply when there is no context to guess by.  So he tore off a small piece of the paper covering the exam table and wrote it out for me. Okay, got it! (Resourceful on the spot–I like it!)

He held up the pink shawl for his wife and he and the young nurse admired it while I explained the tradition of lace wedding ring shawls. He took his wedding band off and pictured it against the stitches and asked, and I grinned, “Probably better yours than your wife’s size!” while saying that the reinforced neck edge would be the only reason it wouldn’t go through. He loved it.

He had done micro-sized stitches that had healed up unbelievably fast, with so much less pain than I’d expected–I mean, I knew it was a bigger surgery in January, but–and so I was giving tiny stitches in baby alpaca back in thanks. He was deeply gratified.  And to my surprise, a little abashed (but very pleased) at my complimenting his work.

The surgeon who’d assisted him was, as it turned out, the surgeon I’d had in January; her new job wasn’t so far away after all. I was thrilled to get to see her again three weeks ago.  (She’s the one who ran into me downtown last Saturday.)  There was a skein of Sea Silk at Purlescence–the Glacier–in exactly the colors I’d seen her wearing many a time, so, having already knit her a full shawl back then, that skein had leaped out at me  as a scarf for her. A little variety in the wardrobe.

At the end, I pulled a Purlescence bag out of my bag so he would have a Santa Claus pack to haul the loot around in.

And then one more thing: the young nurse, having watched all this going on, was suddenly stunned when I reached back into the main bag, pulled out a scarf that would go well with her coloring, and tossed it (I still had that silly gown on, there are limits to one’s dignity in such circumstances) across to her.

And at last I got to see her really happy too.

Afterwards, I walked over to the main hospital to give out nine more scarves.  Lace flowers to match Stanford’s gardens, lace leaves for the plants, etc.  I went hither and yarn…  I finally got one to one of the nurses I’d had while in the oncology unit back when that had been the only available bed in the hospital last time. She was a good one. She needed to know she was remembered.

Wait, what floor had I been on again this time?  Okay, that’s the bone marrow unit, that’s the post-surgery ICU, been there (says Stanford Accounting, don’t remember it) but not that…  They’d closed off an inner corridor and my visual memory, always shaky since early in my lupus, was just lost.  I got a whole lot of walking done.

I didn’t get to see everybody I wanted to, but when I finally went, oh, duh. Right. THAT floor!, the nurse at the desk got to anticipate playing Santa too, with a big grin on her face. This time, I left the stack of scarves in a sweater-sized ziploc with a list of names. People could pick what they liked. The one person who had a specific one coming her way, in pink to match her scrubs three weeks ago, I did get to see and hug in thanks for her caring. Very cool.

It was her project I had had in my hands when Dr. S had come into my hospital room and, in answer to my query, had said his wife liked that color.  It was her scarf I took to the shelves at Purlescence, looking for a match. And they do.

It wasn’t till I was almost asleep last night that I realized that that blue Half Moon Bay pattern hadn’t come home with me–I’m pretty sure there was one more scarf in that bag than there were names I’d remembered.  Cool.  Maybe that first-night’s nurse whose name and face were lost to my post-anesthesia haze got one after all.

I am so tired.

I am so happy.

It was such a good day.

“I get to play Santa Claus!”

Yes!

By, say, wearing a cool Sock Summit t-shirt and a Sock Summit pin and wearing Sock Gate-colorway socks, dyed by Tina (you have to knit them first) when actually, no, you weren’t at Sock Summit.

This drive-by knitting gift landed in my mailbox today, from Nancy, crediting JoAnne, with a little tag in there from Ellen, and saying Stephanie approved.  A group hug, it sounds like.  Thank you doesn’t begin to express the sense of wonder at being included like this.  Wow.  Cool.  Thank you!

I confess to cowardice last month: I did tell my surgeon there was a knitting conference. I waited to see his reaction before I was going to specify that it was actually not just that, but a sock knitting conference–and then somehow as we talked about things related to the kinds of stitches he was going to be doing, it never quite came up.

Heh.  I know how I can make it obvious now. Now that I’ve broken him in on the general idea, with my husband enthusiastically nodding that oh yes, thousands of knitters come to these knitting conferences, I can show that indeed we do.

And now that I have been made well at his and the other surgeons’ hands, next time I won’t have to miss it. Or even worry about missing it.  I can’t tell you what a gift that is.

Meantime, this is what Sea Silk looks like in Glacier when it’s damp, which it won’t be for very long. One more finished!  Silly doctors probably don’t realize the post-op is supposed to be a grand reunion time: my head surgeon will just have to go play a knitterly Santa Claus afterwards, I imagine.  Think he’ll mind?

Seven thousand seven hundred forty tiny pink loops today, two rounds of icing my hands so I could keep going, and it’s time to call it a night. But not before I take a moment to compare the growing shawl to the scarf whose color the doctor complimented (but which I didn’t have enough of in my stash) when I asked him what his wife might like.

Thank you, Sandi at Purlescence, for helping me find a good match after all when I was afraid it couldn’t be done.

A stray thought: as I told Carol, I’m dilaudid to know how to spell that med finally.

I overdid it yesterday. I paid for it. Talked to the surgeon’s nurse. Don’t want to go back in this time around, so I’m trying to take it easier today, but it’s hard to stay down.

While I was knitting away in the hospital, I asked someone their favorite color.  They quite liked the one I was working with, but it was already earmarked and I didn’t have enough of it for two, so I was thinking, not a problem. I’ll just go dye this lovely white that’s in my stash when I get home.

Oh. Wait. Not supposed to lift anything over 10 pounds for six weeks, and how heavy is that dyepot?  Right.  Purlescence may just have to put up with me buying yarn.  I think they can manage that.

So I’ve been finishing up the pink alpaca project at hand, alternating with lying down reading a good book Robin sent me called “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be.”  As in, he wouldn’t act like a normal dog: he could climb up and down ladders, trees (down: not so much), walk along six-foot-high fencelines. Marley Fowat is the author, it was originally published in 1957, and I wonder if that’s where the famous dog Marley got his name.

My favorite part is when someone from New York, whose train was just about to leave, got told by the local yokels there on the plains in Saskatoon that Mutt was a Prince Albert Retriever (there was no such thing) and the finest hunting dog on the planet.

He bet them $100 Mutt was not.

It was July, not hunting season at all, but local dignity must be maintained. So the men showed up hoping for a demonstration.

Mutt’s owner got out his rifle. In the middle of downtown.  Mutt was immediately interested but confused because… Summertime? Here? And the guy shot off his unloaded gun, declaring, “Bang Bang. Go get’em, Mutt!”

The dog took off like a shot, nearly mowing two women down. Came back very soon after with a perfect ruffed grouse in his mouth.

The men were going wh a a a …. Then one noticed it was stuffed. Moments later, the owner of a store down the street came running in, yelling about the dog stealing the stuffed grouse they kept on display in their shop’s window.

Hey. Owner uses gun, owner wants bird, owner gets bird, right?

The man’s son, writing this memoir years later, said that that story made national Canadian news.

And it’s helped me take it easy like I needed to.  I’m afraid of letting it end. So I’m up for just a few to go blog.

I love Romi’s *roving badge touring Sock Summit!  So much for Monty Python: “Badges? Badges! We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” Yes, we do.  What a cool idea.

I tried to catch up on my email yesterday and found it too big a job, but I want you all to know how much I appreciate every note and every comment. I didn’t say things too well on the blog, though: they took me off the IV painkiller, but oh goodness, I am definitely still on vicodin.

The roommate I’ve had all along got discharged this morning and came over to say goodbye before she left. She couldn’t quite stand up straight yet, she said.  She was wearing bluejeans and I winced for her and silently wished she had a jumper to go home in too.  But I realized afterwards that I’d let that distract me and I’d missed my chance to tell her something far more important: that when her husband and family had come in every evening, the joy and the love that radiated through the curtain was just wonderful to hear and a real blessing to me that I’d needed.  I’m too deaf to have overheard any conversations, but the part that mattered, that came through loud and clear.  The caring. The joy.

My abysmally low blood pressure was getting in the way of my healing–there’s a risk of pneumonia if you don’t get moving post-op, and I did just enough coughing to realize I surely didn’t want to go there.  But at the same time, they didn’t want me walking if I couldn’t get that top number to 80.  One of the surgeons on duty decided last night to try infusing me with albumen to see if that would help.

Boy did it.  I was walking for ten minutes soon after, with the very last of the IV bottle bubbling up–Richard said it looked like angel food cake batter being worked up. So now I can say I’ve mainlined angel food cake (still waiting to be able to claim that on chocolate.)  Pass the whipped cream.

I asked the nurse where the albumen comes from; she didn’t know. Richard promptly googled from the laptop and answered, Cows.

Cows?

Cows.

So does this mean someone who’s allergic to eggs could still have angel food cake? (Notice the one-track mind.) Freeze some crushed Heath bars to sprinkle in that whipped cream, okay?

Meantime, nobody’s been able to find that ziploc stuffed with scarves since I arrived. I’m sure I’ll find them immediately once I’m the one looking. But I managed to sit up long enough to finish a nearly-done one this morning, and the nurse I’ve had for the last few days was not comprehending as I explained how to rinse and lay it out to dry for the lacework to stand out and the thing to lengthen. It matched her shirt pretty well.  It was fun watching her face light up when she realized I really meant this thing she’d seen me working on was for her. Elann Baby Silk yarn, baby alpaca/silk.

Seeing someone’s face light up at being knit for.  Reclaiming Real Life in that moment.  Getting better is a cakewalk now.

*Roving is the word for fiber that has been washed, carded, and is ready to spin. I just needed to let Don in on the pun here.

So much to say. I can’t do justice to any of it.

I want to say how my friend Lisa, 20 years ago, decided she and I should go visit John at Children’s, that we did once a week while he was in there and how we got to have the joy of watching him coming back.  How the day Highway 880 was on almost total shut-down from an accident, the one day John’s mother Nanci couldn’t get through–Lisa had previously been a cop in Hayward and knew all the back roads.  She and I got our visit in, not knowing his mom was still stuck back there on the freeway.  It helped her later to find out he hadn’t been left alone after all.

Our time and sense of purpose together during that is what deepened our friendship to where, when I was diagnosed with lupus a year later, she was willing to volunteer to take my preschoolers every morning so I could go do swim therapy. She asked if I would then watch hers while she worked out.  Tara’s Redwood Burl shawl story in my book?  We’re talking about that Lisa.

I want to say how stunned I was to sign today for a package from Canada and find another afghan!!! and then, not only that, it was not one but TWO afghans made from squares people had started knitting in January via a Ravelry group to try to wish me back to good health.  Thank you, everybody, and especially Anne for putting all of those together.  (And for chocolate!)  All the well wishes, and arriving on the day I saw my surgeon, whom I adore, for a follow-up… Wow. What can I say? Wow.  How could anyone be anything but well after that?

And it was kind of funny, because for a moment there when I gave my surgeon her black cashmere shawl as I’d waited so long to be able to do, it was almost as if she might protest something silly like I am not worthy!

And now here I sit feeling myself precisely in her shoes. Wow. What I haven’t said on the blog, is, I had that allergic reaction but also a staph infection on top of it and we’re still fighting it.  The afghans are a great comfort–this little bit of illness now is nothing.  I WILL get over this.

I’ve only begun to look at that Ravelry site. I want to savor it, I want to take it in, I want to soak up each post.  But for just this moment I can’t give it what it so much deserves, because I’ve got so much to do because I need to bake a cake and go to the grocery store and and and…

I want to say happy birthday to my Richard!  Maybe that’s why there were two afghans  in there?  Wow.  (You see? I can’t possibly do justice to all these subjects at once.)

And especially because.  (Wishing her amaryllises from afar.) Kay of Mason-Dixon Knitting just lost her husband after a brief illness, someone far too young to go.  (But. But. NO. *I* got better, so everybody else should too!)  I am so sorry for her loss and her children’s.

Love your dear ones.  Life is so terribly short sometimes.

And thank you all for loving me so dearly and so knitterly and so well.  I am utterly gobsmacked. Again.

So much to say…

There was a photo in the paper yesterday of tree pieces being cut up and removed from the roadway after a heavy windstorm the other day.  My outside amaryllises, however, being used to a bit of breeze out there, somehow did just fine.  It did help that they had an awning overhead and two outside walls of the house for shelter, but still.  Not such a fragile plant after all, if you give it a little experience with the elements of life.  These, even though they had buds starting to open that would easily catch like a sail the wider they got, gave way in the wind just enough to still stay upright and no more.  I know–I was watching them nervously and debating bringing them in.  But they seemed okay.

And then there was a green hummingbird at my tall one today! I was afraid to move, then finally reached for my camera, at which point it of course skittered away.

So I tried to get a picture to at least show you the flower it had gone to.  At first, standing on my tiptoes with my arms held high over my head, I got this, which gave me a pretty good hummingbird’s-eye view as it zeroed in.

And then, looking up from ground level, this:

Well, okay, but I really wanted a good shot of that flower, so I tried standing on a chair.

We’re getting there.

Oh, and: my surgeon’s shawl is blocked, yarn ends run in and trimmed, and ready to go. The cashmere seems so fragile to me! I keep telling myself that all knitted up into a fabric like it is now is much different from testing a strand held taut to break it; the finished shawl has a greater strength and resilience than how the yarn alone immediately seems.

Susan’s koala bear that I mentioned the other day came through the mail uncommonly fast .  But I was starting to fight a cold and hesitated to touch it or take it across the street quite yet, and gave it a few days–that, and, their cars just seemed not to be around.

The mom’s wasn’t when I took the amaryllis flower over there, either, come to think of it.

Yesterday I looked at their empty driveway and thought, did they already move back to Ireland? But it was supposed to be the end of the month!  So when the dad’s car showed up, I decided I’d better get that bear to him while I knew I could. My sniffles were better, thank goodness.

He loved it. I told him it was from a thrilled new grandma whose love was spilling over and she wanted to share it with them.  The young dad, so far from home, was touched and grateful and thought it was so cute.

And then he opened up at last and told me his son was in the hospital with kidney problems and vomiting and had had a 105 degree fever.

Oh goodness. I told him my Sam had once had a 105.2 and it was terrifying; I so hoped his son would heal quickly.  And then I went home and prayed for little Jack. I’ve been thinking since then that I need to offer to help feed the dog and to offer to gather up volunteers from church to help  do their packing for them if they need it.  Anything to support them at such a painful time.

Wow.  The timing.  Susan, your knitted koala was not only a cute toy, it became the means by which that family had neighbors present for them to care about them and their son in a moment they needed it badly.

There are no small acts of kindness. Sometimes life shows you just how powerful a little gesture really is. THANK you, Susan!!

Reader Susan to the rescue: she sent a knitted koala for the neighbors whose baby got locked in the car. Big enough to be safe for a little one, soft, cute, easy to hold and cuddly.  What Susan probably didn’t know is, remember my tiger? (He’s in this post too.)  My sister got a koala at the same time, so, koalas bring back happy childhood memories for me; I wish she could have seen the smile on my face as I opened the box up. (Wow, that came fast!)

And now Jack will have a little bit of America to take home to Ireland that is small enough to easily go in a suitcase or be tucked down the side of his carseat onboard. Cool. Thank you, Susan!

Amanda, I totally guessed it: the nurse I expected picked out the scarf from the yarn you gifted me with in Vermont. The colors were just right.

I had an appointment at Stanford’s outpatient ostomy unit yesterday, and you know what I showed up with in my knitting bag, hoping again to get to see some more of my old nurses.  And I did.

The whole time I was knitting Amanda’s Huarache yarn I kept thinking how good it would look on A.  And now it does.  Cool.

Two other nurses chose their favorites, and the bright green still waits for P; they told me she’ll be in next week.

But what most delighted them was simply getting to see me walking in there and looking well.  It was fun watching the doubletakes, followed by the hugs in intense delight.  Seeing me well validates what their work is all about.  Seeing me coming back to show them I am well now validates who they personally are and how they go about their day as they do what they do.  They care. It shows.  In return, their patients really do care about them too.

So I’ve been picturing them wearing their scarves the rest of their shifts yesterday. Maybe someone asked them where those suddenly came from in the middle of the day. Maybe another patient decided that they might come back later to say thank you too, seeing how happy it was making their nurse.

Maybe. I don’t know. But, knitting as love made just a little more visible: I can hope.

It was time to get a knit on!

(I wondered if I could get a good picture of the colors and the deep black in the same photo. The answer is not yet.)

I knitted scarves for all those nurses, and meantime, the larger project I’d started had been put aside.  Black laceweight in a fairly fragile cashmere (fragile as compared to, say, the tensile strength of baby alpaca, the fiber I knit with the most often) is a bit of a challenge to work with. If you remember this you’ll know I am perfectly capable of dropping stitches in dark colors and not seeing till I go to block the thing.  This project would be far harder to repair and take far more hours if I had to frog and redo.  So the knitting on the black shawl for my surgeon was going very carefully. Very slowly. And for about a week there, not at all.

But with my new get-well afghan in my lap, how could I not be inspired?  Given how very thrilled I am at being on the receiving end of it, my desire to create that same thrill at being thought about and cared about like that has given me the push I needed to really get going.  I’ve done a huge amount of work on this shawl the past two days.

Meantime, the block in one corner has LynnH‘s handdyed yarn with a tiny heart and a sock appliqued on the square, and inside the sock, a note-in-a-bottle effect in ocean-colored yarn.

Haven’t figured out how to do that in the shawl. I guess I’ll just have to leave it plain.

A few weeks ago, a customer at Purlescence asked me how I liked the afghan.

Afghan?

Apparently, uh, oops.

And then a few people on KnitTalk started mentioning it: Elizabeth had been gathering knitted squares from folks who wanted to wish me well and a speedy recovery, starting back in January when things were so very bad.  Elizabeth told me last week the result was now finally on its way.

I promised not to peek at her blog.

(Did you peek?)  That was really hard! (I didn’t, though.)

Today, the mailman went past. No box. Just like yesterday.  Just like the day before.  The UPS guy let me be disappointed just long enough, and then, tadaaah!

Wow.

And just, wow.

Sitting on top inside was a large ball of silk yarn from purlsyarnemporium.com, a lavendar pillow, and, wrapped in gray silk, a stack of cards and notes offering hopes for my return to good health and expressing a great deal of love, over and over, as I opened the envelopes.

There are ninety squares in this afghan.  Some knitters wrote; some let their stitches state plainly and clearly what they were feeling.   Some squares came with stories, some of them were the stories.

All the yarns are soft.  They match up beautifully together, and if you’ve ever tried to knit squares of different yarns to the same size, even just one knitter working alone, you know how hard it is to get the sizes to match. And yet, in Elizabeth’s hands and everybody else’s, these all came together just so.

Elizabeth’s mother did a square that I’m sorry to say the post office has yet to find.  The afghan came up one short. Elizabeth’s husband knitted his first item to make the last square. I don’t need to tell her this, but he’s a keeper.

This last photo is a shout-out to Robinfre, who’s been signing her emails with these words for all the years I’ve known her: she gave me my best laugh of the day!

And now I’m off to Purlescense for Knit Night–and where 37 of the 90 squares were knitted and contributed when I wasn’t looking.

(p.s. Ed. to add: Jasmin and Gigi with their Knitmore Girls podcast got the word out for the squares being collected at Purlescence.  Thank you!)

That’s been my phrase for it.  It was the yahoo KnitTalk group that started using my name as a verb, but drive-by knitting was always my phrase for it.

I like the responses in the comments to Dad’s suggestions, and thank you. The easiest thing to do would be to set up a Ravelry place for people to share stories, there already being a place for pictures of projects and yarns there, although that excludes the non-Ravelry subscribers.  The stories are what inspire, they’re what help get people going, and I’d go for any way to make that happen, Ravelry or however.

Meantime, I got driven past, myself: a turtle showed up in the mail today, a water turtle to match my shawl pattern, one could say, because Diana felted it.  I love the cheerful colors.  Thank you!

I saw my surgeon this morning, and she was highly pleased at my progress and at the condition of my stoma and incision.  But just seeing me looking my normal self, cheerful and no longer a lump in a bed–it made her day. This is why she does what she does. To make people healthy again.

I thanked her for saving my life, and she was a bit abashed for a moment–but she had, and she knew it and I knew it.  She had admired my book in the hospital, so next I gave her a copy with that thank you for my saving my life there in the inscription.  Put it in writing.  Keep it for always. Know that the work you do and the way you go about it, visiting your patients every day before and after, is important, dear woman.  I asked her to thank her husband for loaning her to me for all that time she spent on me, which was considerable.

I did feel I had to explain to her as I stumbled trying to get up on the exam table that in real life, I use a cane for my balance.  (I don’t think she’d noticed it against the wall)  because of that car accident way back when.

Anyway. Jennie and I celebrated afterwards by going to Coupa Cafe downtown.  (I wish their site included the gorgeous long photo on the wall of the farm.)  This is a well-loved local hole-in-the-wall bringing Venezualan coffee and cacao beans directly from farm to here.  Theirs is seriously good stuff (I’m told the coffee is too) and the fact that we actually got a table almost right away was highly unusual.  If you ever want to celebrate being able to eat chocolate, this is definitely the place to do it.

And celebrate we did.  To life!

I talked to my Dad on the phone today. Remember when he said he had an idea for knitters?  He’d written it up and he wanted to know if I would let it be a blog post here.  I said sure, Dad–and then he made me absolutely promise not to touch it, not to edit a single word.

Ooookayyyy…  You know you’re in trouble when…  I promised.

Oh, and Dad? The last time I saw Grandmother Jeppson before she passed, I was admiring the afghans she’d made and wishing I had the patience someday to knit a project that big.

I think she’d be pleased.

Now, being the daughter, I think I’m nowhere quite near as famous as Dad thinks I am, nor that I deserve to be.  I also squirm when people describe my name as a verb the way he’s referring to.  There are many knitters more generous than I.  I don’t give things away to be on record; I do it for the selfish reason that it makes me feel wonderful, not to mention the person I’ve knit for.  I also tend to knit scarves or the like when I don’t know the person well: it’s a small enough project that if they’re not thrilled to the bone, it’s okay, it didn’t take me six months to do.  But the goodwill in the knitting is just the same, large project or small, and I certainly do a fair number of large projects to give as well.

All that said, I’ll sit down, be quiet, and let Dad have his say:

Knitters’ Idea

Five or six years ago while watching Alison knit something she intended to give away I suggested that she make a log of what she had knitted and to whom she had given it.  I thought it would make an interesting record. She moaned, saying she could not remember many of them. We finally concluded she probably had given away 200 of her wares. I would not be surprised if the total now came closer to 500. She may wish to correct these figures.
Whatever the number, Alison has become so internationally known for knitting things which she could give to special, and usually unsuspecting, people that her name has become a verb describing the act. “To Alison someone.” The harrowing attack of Crohn’s from which she is recovering has demonstrated how much she is admired and loved.
Knitting something and giving it to an unsuspecting person is an act of kindness that can have wonderful, extensive, and long-lasting repercussions. The practice deserves encouragement. I would like to suggest to followers of spindyeknit, and to others as the word is spread, a means of fostering this goodness.
I suggest the creating–either as merely an informal grouping, or later as a legal entity–of The Alison Hyde Knitters Gifts Foundation. It could work along three different lines or levels.
1. It would simply be a database. Knitters would be encouraged to Alison someone–and whenever possible send to the database a photo of the object, the story behind the gift, the name of knitter/giver, and something about the recipient (just described, not necessarily named). As this information accumulates in a fashion that anyone can access, the practice will spread. This will likely generate additional comradery among knitters.
2. Knitters (or others) who have surplus yarn can list it on the database as something they will give to any recipient who will promise to knit the yarn into something she/he will give away. Recipients might be expected to pay incoming postage and sign some sort of pledge form.
3.  In its ultimate possible development, yarn producers or importers who have a surplus product might donate it to the Foundation for distribution as in No. 2 above. At this level the Foundation probably would need to be legally established as a charitable entity so that major donors would be motivated by some tax benefit. Perhaps there is a knitter or a spouse who could handle this. Also, if the Foundation develops to this stage it probably will need to do a little fund raising to cover expenses.
I am not a knitter, although I have been the nation’s foremost expert on modern, handwoven French tapestries for many years. But my mother was a knitter, and maybe that gene passed to Alison. During World War II, the entire country was mobilized..  Every community had volunteer projects to help the war effort in some fashion. We lived in Carson City, Nevada, which, though the state capital, had only about 3,000 people. My parents had three sons, no daughters. My oldest brother, Robert, was the supply officer on the Petroff Bay, a pocket aircraft carrier which fought in every major pacific battle of the last two years of the war, including the brutal Battle of Leyte Gulf. My next brother, Richard, although he is in the history books as Morris, was in the Air Corps and used to write our parents not to worry about him because a few weeks after he got overseas the war would be over. No one believed that. Turned out Richard was the weapons officer
on the Enola Gay who armed the atom bomb and was the last person to touch it. I quit high school to volunteer in the Army Specialized Training Program and was training to become a combat engineer.
One of the volunteer projects in Carson City was a band of knitters under the Red Cross. I’ll let my mother tell of it, as she wrote afterwards in her life story.
“….the war years brought so much worry and heart aches to parents of sons. I was really resentful when (Lawrence’s) call came–he was 17. We already had sent our other two sons and he seemed too young to leave home. When we put him on the bus for Pasadena and it pulled away it was almost more than I could bear.
“Just before and during the war I was in turn knitting chairman and County Production Chairman of the Red Cross. We produced an unbelievable amount of hospital garments, sweaters, kits, etc., during this period. I spent an average of five hours a day, six days a week for over two years in this particular service–feeling that if I worked hard enough maybe the war would end sooner and my sons would come home.”
So I am very sympathetic to knitters and aware of the substantial good they can do.
—Lawrence Jeppson, Alison’s Dad.