Prayer Shawls, Pocket Cloths, and Experiments

When I took up knitting last year, I started looking for a way to do it socially and charitably. The Lion Brand website maintains a list, and it turned out that there is a prayer shawl group that meets the second Saturday of each month at Living Water Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Parkville. I joined the group in December 2014. The pastor, Laura Guy, is a member of the group, and I really like her, so I started attending the church. That was another thing that had been missing from my life.

Lion's website address is www.lionbrand.com
Here is the church's website address www.livingwaterchristian.org

Lion has a lot of free prayer shawl patterns on their site, and I've used the basic pattern twice. Buy three skeins of Homespun, cast on 63 stitches, and in every row knit 3, purl 3, to the end, until you run out of yarn. You end up with something like seed stitch, only with fewer changes between knitting and purling. The threes are to give a nod to the holy trinity. This is the first one I made. You may have to create a free Lion Brand account to view the actual pattern. http://www.lionbrand.com/patterns/81040AD.html?noImages=0

I have also made one using the Cashews pattern from Alice's Embrace, an organization that donates to Alzheimer's patients. http://www.alicesembrace.com/patterns/#/cashews/

This summer, one of the group's members attended the big meeting of the Disciples church and came back with the suggestion we make pocket cloths or shawls in addition to the larger ones. They're portable, they're a ton faster to make, and they can use up small amounts of yarn that are left over from other things. We've been making them with nice soft blanket yarn and jokingly referring to them as "woobies" because they exist for comfort and are fun to feel.

I used patterns from a combination of the following sources:
http://www.oslclaurel.org/ministry/prayer_shawl/prayer_cloths_cross.pdf and
http://holston.org/media/about/resource/2015-pocketprayershawlinfo.pdf

Here are pictures of ones I made using these patterns.

Cross

 

Fish Cloth per the patterns

The next three pictures should be rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise. Until I get that fixed, please tilt your head to the right when viewing them.

 

 Descending Dove

 

Angel

 

Awareness Ribbon (in this case, Leukemia color.)

 

 

Customized two-color cross in University of Missouri colors for a friend to give to her son.

 

This is a washcloth pattern from Ravelry. I tried making it smaller by knitting it with finer yarn and smaller needles, but it's still a little too large for a pocket cloth in my opinion. I'd feel funny washing dishes with it, too. http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/3-crosses-cloth

This is another washcloth pattern available on Ravelry. I used an ombre yarn with blues and greens to make it, since we are Living Water. http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/wave-pool-cloth

The fish pattern above looks more like a shield to me. Instead, I experimented with the traditional Christian fish symbol and made up my own chart. Here's mine. I doubled the yarn when I did the duplicate stitch of the cross, and next time I will just use a single strand. I shared it on Ravelry as a free pattern. http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/christian-fish-prayer-cloth

My Christian Fish

Same story with the dove. It looked more like an arrow to me, so I am experimenting with one modeled after the Dove Soap logo. This is scrap yarn and a too-large leaf I had lying around. My hope is that smaller needles and thinner yarn will make it a reasonable size. I'll make an update post once I have it finalized, a decent picture taken, and a published pattern address to share.