This is what you get when you combine baseball, good friends and knitting. My pal Melissa is the first person I met when I moved to Indiana. She was knitting in the “wild” at a mom and pop version of Chuck E. Cheese while her daughter was playing. We lost track of each other over the years but every now and then I’d bump into her at Kindermusik. Fast forward to about a year ago, I ran into her in the parking lot of Sam’s and invited her to our knitting group. She’s been coming regularly ever since.
Melissa is a huge fan of our local baseball team, the Evansville Otters. She attends games all season and makes any game a stitch and pitch opportunity.
I got this idea to make her a cowl based on a pattern I had heard about where a team’s season’s wins and losses could be documented in yarn.
I have been mulling over this idea for years but finally all the thoughts collided. That’s how this cowl materialized.
Here’s how the scarf came to be. I chose the four colors that are represented in the Otters, basically their team colors.
Every game is represented with a stripe two rounds high.
A home win is maroon. An away win is navy.
A home loss is white and an away loss is grey.
While this is probably meant to be knit as the season unfolds, I knit Melissa’s after the end. The best part of this cowl is that the Otters went to the playoffs and ended up winning the Frontier League Championship.
I had a lot of fun making this cowl. I surprised Melissa with it as an any-day-fairy-gift which made it even more satisfying. She put it on immediately . Later that day she was dropping off donation hats for a winter drive at Bosse Field (where the Otters play). The general manager of the Otters went nuts over the cowl. He asked her if she could knit ten of them for an auction in the middle of the season this summer. Being the fan that she is, she said yes and being the friend I am, I said I would knit two more.
Too bad I don’t have a baseball game to watch while I work these next ones up…
Neat idea. Again I see generosity.
That is the best! It looks better since the didn’t win every game :0)