The 2021 Minnesota State Fair Premium books are here! You can find the needlecraft book, which covers knitting, here. Some important dates...

• Registration opens Monday, June 7th
• Registration ends Tuesday, August 10th at 4:30pm
• Delivery is Saturday, August 14th - Monday, August 16th
• Return is Wednesday, September 8th and Thursday, August 9th

Because of budget constraints due to not having the fair in 2020, there are only cash prizes for Sweepstakes winners, there are still ribbons though, and sponsored categories this year. Really, I don't think any of us enter for the money. The Guild is giving away fifteen ribbons and memberships this year.

Some of our ribbon winning members from years past have shared their tips for entering your knitting items here. 

Remember the knitting categories are not the only places you can enter. There are knitting categories in the Work of Senior Citizens and Garment Making.

State Fair Gnome Takeover

Some of you may remember back in 2019 the Creative Activities building at the Fair was full of a lot of Harriet's Hats after our knit along. Since so many people had been knitting gnomes over this past year, we thought it would be fun to get as many people as possible to enter them in the fair, so the display cases will be full of gnomes. 

You cannot enter dolls in the hand knitting categories, but they can be entered in the Handcrafts section under dolls. The do require dolls have legs, so you may have to add some to your gnome, but that's what i-cords are for!

Round 2 of our Variations on a Theme hat challenge to benefit the MKG’s service knitting partners is starting! So pick up your needles this holiday weekend and hop to! We'll start posting variations as soon as we have enough, but the [soft] deadline is June 18!

IMPORTANT: Some users report experiencing migraines and seizures when accessing Ravelry due to their site redesign. Links in this blog post direct to Ravelry pages and are spelled out accordingly. If you are prone to either of these issues, please proceed with caution when clicking the Ravelry links.

For this round, we've chosen the Fancy Ribby hat by Elena Nodel (pattern page on Ravelry). This is mainly a child's hat, but the pattern has a range of sizes. Here's a photo of a child's size, knit in Red Heart worsted.

And here is the hat, as knit by the designer and modeled. (Note the variations in the top treatment, and note the difference when it's stretched to size!)

_{A reminder of how the challenge works:}

~ We’ll choose a free hat pattern suitable for MKG’s service knitting projects.
~ Each participating knitter will choose their own yarn, needles, and creative variations on the pattern. 
~ Each knitter will knit their piece, then send a photo of it plus a few sentences describing their choice of yarn and their variations to Bonnie at swie0006@umn.edu .
~The photos and description will be compiled into a post for the MKG blog. This will start in 3 WEEKS, roughly June 18, so please submit your variations before then if possible.
~ We hope you will donate your hat for MKG’s service knitting projects, though that’s not a requirement for participating. 
~ We’ll continue to choose additional patterns and repeat the process as long as there are interested knitters.

Please DM Bonnie on Ravelry (artistnumber91) or email her (swie0006@umn.edu)
if you would like to participate!

And if you're on Instagram, tag us and use the hashtag #VariationsOnAThemeChallenge so we can shout you out!

The Guild is planning a Mystery Mini Skein event later this summer and we are looking for fingering weight yarn to make into mini skeins. 

Got any partial skeins in your stash that could use a new home? We’d love to have them! We’re looking at you, sock and shawl knitters! Partial skeins must be at least 20 grams.

Maybe you’ve got a skein of fingering weight yarn that was purchased in a moment of madness, or didn’t fit within its intended project, or was a well-intentioned gift that wasn’t your style. We’d love to take it off your hands! We can make 5 mini skeins from a full skein!

Of course, we’ll also take any existing 20 gram mini skeins you have in your stash. Maybe there’s a mini skein or two that just never spoke to you from a set, or when you brought it home, it didn’t match with your existing palette as well as you hoped it would. Whatever the story, we’d love to have it!

Donation Details:

• Our main donation event will be the July 18th Garage Sale, details to come.
• For those who cannot make the July Garage Sale, you can mail your donations to Jess D., our Newsletter Editor, who is coordinating this event. Please email her at newsletter.mnkg@gmail.com for more information. If you’d like to mail your donations, you will be responsible for postage. Donations by mail must be received by July 31, 2021.
• We will accept mini skeins or partial skeins of fingering weight yarn that weigh at least 20 grams. Any excess yarn that cannot be converted into a mini skein will not be returned (e.g., 90 grams would make 4 mini skeins and have 10 grams leftover). If you have information about the yarn (e.g., label, fiber blend, dyer, colorway, etc.), we’d love to have it! Some knitters like to keep a detailed list of their stash!
• We will accept solids, tonals, variegated colors, speckles, and even bare yarn.
• Please, no self-patterning yarns (e.g., Regia or self-striping)
• Volunteers will convert the partial skeins into mini skeins, curate the kits, and package the sets for shipping. If you’d like to volunteer to help, please reach out to Jess D. at newsletter.mnkg@gmail.com!
• If you’d like to convert your partial skeins into mini skeins prior to donating them (which would be amazing!), check out these tutorials! Also a great option if you’d like to curate your own mini skein set from your stash!
  • Written tutorial: here
  • Video tutorials: here (with lots of information on the calculations!), here (using a quilting ruler), here (requires a swift and scale)
  • Note: most of these use a swift. If you don’t have one, you can use a stable object (as shown in the written tutorial), it just takes a little more effort from you, since it doesn’t spin!

In our ongoing Variations on a Theme Challenge, we've talked about striping and other colorwork variations of the 1898 Hat pattern (Ravelry pattern page) that MKG knitters have made.

Before we kick off our second pattern, we'll tackle differences in structure and weight in the 1898 Hat by our intrepid service knitters!

IMPORTANT: Some users report experiencing migraines and seizures when accessing Ravelry due to their site redesign. Links in this blog post direct to Ravelry pages and are spelled out accordingly. If you are prone to either of these issues, please proceed with caution when clicking the Ravelry links.

Barbara Rice (babsknits126 on Ravelry) had a lonely skein of Lopi in her stash and knit it into a hat that looks like a Viking helmet! Lopi is bulky yarn so she decided the doubled ear flaps might be too thick and made the earwarmer section with one layer. She knitted a built-in I-cord on the lower edge.

Can't you just see this in purple (with horns!) at a Vikings' game?

Elise Frederick (skqFurElise on Ravelry) went the opposite way with her yarn choice, using doubled sport weight yarn for two hats in order to use up remnants from finished projects or UFOs she knew she didn't really want to finish (one of them being 30 years old!).

Her navy hat, knit on size 8 needles, matches the gauge specified in the pattern, resulting in a 19" circumference while the darker blue hat, knit on size 9s, resulted in a 21" circumference.

Some knitters added interest to the crown of the hat, like Heike Tschautscher with a mistake stitch rib:

... and Julie Muehlberg (woolyjooly on Ravelry) with an I-cord bouquet. Julie's version is knit on size 7 needles with West Yorkshire Spinnery Croft yarn in color Bixter.

The next hat, one of mine (artistnumber91 on Ravelry), looks like a standard hat from the outside...

...but has a secret pocket inside the headband! The pocket, which closes with a snap was created by picking up only the outside layer of the headband for 14 stitches, then both layers for the rest of the headband. The two layers of the headband were sewn together at the two sides of the pocket.

Roxanne Richardson (Rox on Ravelry) knit her variation with a two-layer crown, resulting in a reversible hat. She picked up stitches from the wrong side of only one edge of the headband to create the outer hat and so that the slipped stitch edge created a decorative transition from band to crown. The outer hat, knit with Cascade 220, is shown directly below.

She picked up stitches from the wrong side of the other edge of the headband for the inner crown. She didn't have enough Cascade for the entire inner crown, so that was knit with some woolen-spun Zwartbles yarn:

We close with one more colorwork version, this one from Amy Jabas (knittinginpublic on Ravelry), using Plymouth Encore Worsted. She knit the slip stitches that create the fold on the headband in a different color, then added a little bit of color after joining the headband to the crown.

A warm thank you to everyone who shared their photos and descriptions and to all the knitters who are participating in our service knitting projects!
Stay tuned for Round 2 of the Variations on a Theme challenge.