Sunday, January 09, 2005

WHAT IS A BROWN BAG EXCHANGE?
A number of guilds around the country have done Brown Bag Exchanges so we have decided it would be fun to also do one.
The way it works is this: Bring a brown bag with enough yarn in it to knit a hat. Choice of color and type of yarn is up to you. You can put several balls of leftovers from your stash in there. Or you could put a skein of something you’d love to see knit up. It can be acrylic or wool or cotton or a mixture of fibers. Whatever yarn you put in your bag needs to be enough to knit an adult size hat.

Do not put anything in the bag with the yarn that would identify you. This is to be
anonymous yarn. Bring the bag to the meeting on February 2. The bags will have a number attached and during the program, you will select a bag another knitter has brought to take home with you.

When you get home with the selected bag of yarn, you will knit a hat from it. The style and/or pattern of the hat is up to you. It can be as plain or as fancy as you want to make it. If you want to embellish the hat with some yarn from your own stash, you can do that. You can knit the hat in the round or flat and seam it. The purpose is for you to be as creative as you want to be in producing a hat from the yarn in the brown bag you took.

You will have until our April meeting to knit your hat so even the slowest knitter
should be able to participate in this fun project. In April, tuck the hat back in a brown bag and bring it to the meeting. The brown bag now containing a hat will be returned to the original owner. Once all hats have been removed from their brown bags, we will model our creations so everyone can admire the work of our very talented members. If the original owner of the yarn doesn’t want to keep the hat, it can be donated to the Children in Crisis charity knitting project or if the fiber is appropriate to the chemo hats project.

Start looking in your stash for your hat yarn. How about that half skein left over from that sweater? Maybe a few yards of some kind of glitzy stuff left from the Christmas scarves? Maybe several colors which could be striped? Got some wool that someone might want to felt? Maybe you have a variegated that would work up in a neat entrelac pattern.

Gather up whatever you have, put it in a brown bag and bring it February 2nd. Even if you never wear a hat, you can participate in our Brown Bag Exchange. Let’s release our creativity and have some fun knitting a hat for our first Brown Bag Exchange.

Any questions please contact Genia at (knitgenia-at-aol-dot-com)