The Crochet & Knitting Club is a fairly new club; we’re only two years old, but we’d like to think that we’re going places. Everyone has this image that knitting is for grandmothers in rocking chairs knitting sweaters and socks, but obviously it’s not. We’re not just a club; we’re sort of like a community. As strange as this might sound to some, knitting brings out the best in people; you’ll be pressed to find someone more kind and charismatic than a knitter.

You could call us a not-for-profit club. Everything we knit we either donate or sell and all the money that we make from sales goes straight into a charity of some sort. The money from commissions doesn’t stay around very long; we use it to buy more yarn for the club so that we can make more items to donate or sell. This year alone we’ve made scarves for the Special Olympics, baby hats for the maternity ward of our local hospital, and all our regular commissions that ranged from clothing items to toys and decorations. We’ve also raised money for the Lethbridge Emergency Shelter, the Lethbridge Humane Society, and the Alberta Cancer Foundation, just to name a few.

Our most recent project was an extremely fun one: a knit bomb! Knit bombing is when you completely cover an object with yarn. The idea to knit bomb the pronghorn originally came from photos we’d seen where people had covered everything from trees to bicycles to that bull statue on Wall Street. Look it up; it’s pretty neat what some people have done.
Knit bombing the pronghorn was definitely a group project. I don’t think any of us were quite prepared for the amount of work that went into it; measuring the pronghorn, knitting the various sections, sewing them together and onto the statue, along with the behind the scenes stuff like getting it approved by security. This was definitely a big project but a very worthwhile one; I wouldn’t be surprised if we decide to make this a yearly project.

There are a lot of options for us in future years and we hope to continue the great things we have accomplished over this year. It just goes to show that this isn’t your grandmother’s knitting anymore.