Linus Van Pelt, you know, the kid with the blanket?

When I was young I was almost inseparable from my security blanket. By the time I was old enough to remember the particulars about it, it was already a ragged fragment of cotton waffle weave thermal fabric with the silky binding around the periphery loved to shreds. By the time I was old enough to be willing to give it up it had gotten so fragile that my mother had had to make me a flannel pillowcase to keep it in so I wouldn’t lose bits. I was always a very formal child though. Like Linus I never referred to my blanket as a banky, a binky, or even a blankey. My blanket was always “my blanket”.

Fast forward a lot of years.

In November of 2007, when Andrew had his second back surgery, I took a knitting project with me that I had started -heck- even a decade previously. I’ve pretty much always known how to knit. Watching my mother knit everything from afghans to sweaters to a ham sandwich (really) as I was growing up, it didn’t take much figuring for me to pick up a pair of needles and start klicketing away. I’d never really gotten into knitting in any serious way though. But when I was facing several hours in a hospital waiting room, wound so tightly that I’d have exploded like a watch spring if I’d not had something on which to concentrate…. Well, I figured that knitting would at least keep my hands busy enough that I’d not chew my fingernails down to the cuticles while I was waiting. Besides, I had it in mind that Scrum could use a new blanket. Scrum always loved the texture of knitted things.

And I re-discovered a lost pleasure. Knitting takes enough concentration that one can watch TV (god help you in a hospital waiting room, though!), have a conversation (I didn’t) or listen to a book on disc. My mother can knit and read at the same time, but I’m not that coordinated. So I sat for several hours and, using the tail ends of I don’t know how many skeins of yarn that had been sitting around my study for years, knit probably eight inches of a remarkably ugly blanket which, when finished a few days later, Scrum loved with a passion.

We went to Hawaii for Christmas that year. Before we left I approached my mother to see whether or not she had any ideas for square or rectangular knitting projects with which to distract myself on the airplane. Five hours (one way) crammed into a metal cigar tube inhaling each other’s exhale is usually enough to make me more than a little jittery and I was hoping to have something mindless, but involved enough to keep me from running amok in the middle of the Pacific. I’m not up to knitting complex things. I can knit, with some accuracy, square and rectangular things. Beyond that I tend to be a little spotty.
Mother, bless her, had the perfect solution. The Bellevue Unitarian Church sponsors a low income housing unit, providing furniture, kitchen equipment, dishes, linens, etc. Every time a new family moves into the apartment, the knitting ladies of the church put together an afghan which the family takes with them when they move out. Mom needed knitted quilt blocks, 36 of them, 6 by 9 inches. She even had a box full of the ends of skeins of yarn that she was planning on using for the project. I’m GOOD at knitting rectangular things.
So I spent two weeks in Hawaii, the weather was warm enough but it was rainy and blowing in turns, and two airplane flights knitting myself silly. All of Mom’s acrylic yarn ends as well as an additional 6 skeins were transformed into quilt squares.

Scrum died soon after we got home from Hawaii in January. I’ve written elsewhere about my feelings then. One of the more notable holes that Scrum’s death left in my life was that I no longer had something to keep my hands busy when I sat watching television in the evening. Scrum was a passionate lap sitter and I was used to having a cat tummy to massage any time I sat on the sofa. After a few days of sitting and chewing my fingernails I got out my knitting needles again. All my knitting in Hawaii had gotten Joan inspired to work on a project for a friend of hers. Knitting scarves for a charity in Tibet that provides scarves, hats, mittens, etc. for Buddhist monks.
Minus my cat to tweedle and my mother having no further need for quilt blocks (at least for the time being), I knitted a scarf for Buddhist monks. Scarves are rectangular! I posted the scarf off to Joan and without any further ideas of my own, called my mother again. What can I knit that’s rectangular or square?

Enter The Linus Project.
The Linus Project donates blankets to children’s hospitals, homeless and women’s shelters, basically anywhere that there are likely to be distressed children. A child picks a blanket and has a soft, warm, hand made snuggly for their very own to give them comfort, shelter, and security.
As a grown up Linus, I couldn’t think of a better outlet (nor a better use) for my ingrained need to fidget so I started in.


These are two of the four that I’ve finished for The Linus Project. The fourth isn’t bound yet, but it’s done besides that. I’ve discovered that knitting with kittens in the house is quite a challenge so I’m not sure I’ll be continuing to knit blankets……. but I’ve recently picked up a book on quilting and I’ve got a whole box full of fabric scraps.
Linus was right. Everyone needs a blanket.