Knitting Feeds

I’m writing this in the last minutes at my desk before I pack it all in and leave on the Rally. It’s dark and quiet in the house, but I can hear Ken getting dressed upstairs, getting ready for whatever the day brings us. Yesterday was packing day. It’s the day when we organize all of the things we’ll need to camp and cycle our way across Ontario and into Quebec, more than 600km all the way to Montreal. You get two bins, and you can put anything in them you like. I like to split it up – all my camping things in one bin – my tent, my sleeping pad, my blanket and the stupid camping pillow I bring every year because I suppose I’d rather use that than haul a full size one. (Apparently, since I do it every year.) The other bin gets clothes, cycling stuff, toiletries – and I presume that it is where everyone on the rally puts their yarn and needles.

I am not 100% sure, but I think that is a picture of everyone who has yarn in their bins on the rally this year. I love everyone in that snap, and not (just) because they are knitters. I was watching them all pack up yesterday – putting things in bins, hugging and laughing together, already the tight little knot that we’ll be all week and it struck me that what I love best about them is how committed this team is to taking care of people, both each other and the world they live in.

The weather forecast for today is horrible. Not just bad, or a bit rainy… horrible. Cataclysmic. The worst possible cycling weather. “Special Weather Statement” kind of weather. That statement says things like “heavy rainfall” “multiple thunderstorms” “flooding.” There is every possibility that we will be riding 122km tomorrow in nothing but rain, from the minute we gather to depart, all through the day until a bunch of exhausted, wet, dirty people have to set up tents in a deluge, and then lie in it all night.

We are all hoping this doesn’t happen. Sometimes the forecasts are wrong, sometimes storms just miss towns or cities or groups of cyclists. Right this minute there is only a drizzle. Here in Ontario sometimes these epics are swept out over our great lake to make crashing waves and dramatic scenes and not at all dump on people on bikes and we have our fingers crossed for that. We all spent yesterday trying to laugh it off and not worry about while simultaneously checking the weather for here (Toronto) and where we’re cycling too (Port Hope) to see if maybe it had improved. (No luck yet. Feel free to continuously check the weather as many times as you like too – more people worrying about it can only help manifest the skies we want. If you want to try this, think “tailwind” as well.)

We did something else yesterday – I watched all of Team Knit quietly decide, one by one, that we will double down on caring for each other. The longer we were there the nicer we all got. The Rally is hard, we are always sweet to each other on the road, finding extra kind words, getting someone a coffee, waiting for them so they’re not alone – these gestures are what our backbones are made of out there. All of our success is built on helping each other through it, doing your best to lift someone else knowing that they will lift you, and this exceptional difficulty calls for exceptional kindnesses. I saw as each member of our little pod decided that the way they would find their way through this would be by floating someone else. It works, and it is so lovely when it does.

It is the way the Rally is too, a couple of hundred people all working together deciding that helping someone else is so often the best way to help yourself- whether it’s helping someone change a flat, or deciding that you will use some of your time each year to fundraise and ride through a tsunami to change the lives of grownups and kids with HIV/AIDS.

It works, and it better, because frankly, the weather looks like trash all week.

Team Knit would like to thank you for supporting us and helping us. We’d like you to know that when you donate you lift us up too – and that we can feel that you’re on our team. Many hands make for light work, and the tiniest donation ripples into a big help when it goes into the pile with the rest of the knitters, and we are so, so grateful that you know that and give to this cause. We are all almost at our goals thanks to you, but as always we have hopes to leave those goals in our formidable wake.

Off we go.

1. This morning I’m drinking coffee and getting ready to go ride 100km with Jen’s daughter Fenner. Fenner (I’m sure you know) is part of Team Knit for the third year and the fact that I’m going anywhere with her without Jen and nobody’s calling it babysitting still freaks me out.

2. I’m also feeling kinda freaked out about The Rally in general. We leave in 8 days and if I were to make a list of the things that I have to do before we leave it would be longer than this blog post. (Someone said to me the other day that they’d love to do the Rally but they don’t have time and I didn’t say anything because I was (rather uncharacteristically) wordless.) For starters, everyone on Team Knit has at least a full time job, and besides that if anyone has a minute to figure out why my office will not stay clean for more than 4 minutes every time I clean it I would be very much in their debt. The upside of working this hard to get things done before I take a week “off” is helping to keep me from freaking out about the riding part, which remains something I have way more than a healthy respect for. 660km is no joke.

3. If any one of you ever hears me say again that I am going to knit a hoodie- especially an intarsia one, I would like you to come over here and slap my needles from my hands, preferably so that they make a loud and shocking clatter and unsettle me badly. I’m completely incorrigible. I knit a hoodie about 20 years ago and hated it so much that I guess it took this long for the memory to wear off, but mercy do I dislike them. I am absolutely reconciled to all the usual parts of a sweater, even in pieces. You’ve got a back, a front, then it’s sleeve island and at worst you’ve got to steel yourself for a collar or a buttonband. Hoodies? You do all that and then there’s another huge part as big as a third sleeve. Who, I ask you, has the strength for that.

4. Apparently I do because stick a fork in me knitters but I am done. All the parts are finished and last night I started sewing it together and you bet your sweet little stash that there is going to be a sweater today (if I have the strength after the training ride to do anything but weep) or tomorrow.

Pattern is 172-Pull à capuche (that’s french for hoodie) and I knit it in Double Sunday because Elliot likes that yarn. (I do too, so no problem. Clearly the training is taking hold.) NOTE THAT THIS PATTERN IS ONLY AVAILABLE IN FRENCH.

5. I’d like to thank Mme Lessard (name made up to protect the innocent) who was my high school French teacher because I’m really sorry I skipped your class so often to go hang out with Sean. (Real name. He wasn’t innocent at all.) He was seriously smokin’ hot and I loved him but in the end the French has been more useful.

6. Nobody on Team Knit has met their fundraising goal yet, which is kinda the times we’re living in I think, but I like to think that knitters rise above. If you are able to do anything to help, we’d for sure appreciate it, but not as much as the clients who rely on us to raise the operating capital for the charities we ride for. Our links are here.

Friends! I can’t quite believe it, but I’ll be teaching and co-hosting a Knit, Purl, Cruise with Princess Sapphire Cruises (in tandem… 0