IFLA WLIC Day 6 - Knitting!

So, last night at the cultural event, like I said, I spent a good hour or so knitting.  I left with the needles and yarn and the blanket square I'd completed, planning on bringing them back to the charity booth today when I wandered the Exhibition.

As it turns out, today at lunchtime was the collection day for all the blanket squares.  The project was 67 Blankets for Nelson Mandela Day.  Why 67?  Mandela worked for human rights for 67 years of his life, so it's a common number used when honoring him.  

 

This project is like Project Linus in the States, for those familiar with it.  People contribute knit or crocheted blanket squares, and then volunteers will seam the squares together into whole blankets.  People can contribute whole blankets too, if they want.  The completed blankets are then donated to charity.  And excitingly, the Conference knitting group reached their goal - 67 blankets!  Plus a few scarves and hats :)

Most of the people involved with the project here at the conference are local (well, South Africans - some are from Joburg or Pretoria or elsewhere, not all Cape Town).  Many of them were chattering along in Afrikaans around me as we were all knitting while staff counted up the completed squares (a sampling of which is shown above).  One lady noticed me, and asked if there was a similar charity that I was working on.  I said that no, I'd gotten involved after meeting some knitters the day before, and thought I'd stop by to help.  Knitting is pretty universal, after all, and knitters are knitters wherever you are.

And speaking of "knitters are knitter wherever you go," I was sitting and knitting along, and the guy standing next to me knitting (the bearded gentleman in the picture below) mutters under his breath "Oh, kraap!"  And I spell it that way because you can't hear the thick Afrikaans accent otherwise.  But I laughed at how that translates in any language, and he was chuckling and turning a little red, knowing that he'd been overheard dropping a stitch :)

The other funny story from that lunch was that I kept hearing what I thought was my name, except that no one's name tag showed "Lara" or anything like that.  But I asked the lady next to me if someone had that name (I didn't know if it was a word they were using - with my familiarity with Afrikaans, I could have been hearing the word for 'yarn' or 'shoe' or something, and confusing it with my name).  But, lo and behold, there was another Lara there!  We laughed and chatted and swapped business cards, laughing that we are going to form an International Knitting Lara club (current membership: 2).  

Oh, and I got another half a square done as I was sitting and chatting :)  I'd've finished it too, except I had to scoot out to make my afternoon session.

For my knitting notes, I completed one and a half blanket squares in the approximately 2 hours I was working on them.  I cast on 35, knit garter for a few rows, then garter stitched the end 3 stitches and stockinette the middle.  The I finished with a few rows of garter stitch again.  I was on size 5.0mm needles using a DK acrylic.