Holding Hope Kerchief and A Political Murder Mystery

          After Charlottesville in 2017 Taylor Rutledge, a Ravelry member designed this simple kerchief with a mesh pattern called Holding Hope Kerchief.  I thought of this last week when I spied my little ball of leftover yarn of Hawthorne Fingering Multi Yarn in Arleta (I have a bigger ball of it tucked away).  I had kept thinking this color is for something special and never used it in any scrappy shawls I did before, saving it for something special.  Then I remembered this pattern and I cast on!  I have lots of peach and pink and mauve shirts for this summer (besides my standard blues) so I'm thinking this will be the perfect match.  I am considering making it a bit bigger.  I'm wondering can a bit larger kerchief be a tiny neck scarf?  So I'm working towards that and really enjoying the simple knit.  Aren't the colors just sumptuous?

This is a very special quote from Taylor Rutledge's pattern page:

"As I watched the news from Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017…like so many people I didn’t know what to do. But I did have to go to work at our local yarn store. I grabbed a mini skein I had from The Yarn at Home Mom in the vibrant color Glow. I started to knit…to mess around with what I could do with 87 yards. I thought about Heather Heyer and still wondered what I could do. I ended up with this simple kerchief, and I wore it to an anti-hate rally the next evening. I wrote down the pattern and decided one thing I can do is offer this pattern for my kerchief…a knitted prayer… to anyone who wants it. It’s free, but if you download this pattern, please consider donating some money to the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, Black Lives Matter, or similar organizations. Knit one for yourself. Knit one for your favorite activist to say thank you for their hard work. Knit one for a strong young woman you know who stands by her convictions the way Heather Heyer did. Share your knitting. Talk to your community. Keep holding hope."

     Reading a freebie on Kindle that's really good - "Don't Speak: A Jade Harrington Novel" (Jade Harrington Series Book 1); the first in a three part series where the last book was just published last week (series - "Jade Harrington Series" (3 book series).  A mix of a mystery murder story and a story of a Liberal candidate for the presidency and a Conservative president and the inside politics played behind the scenes and the FBI efforts to apprehend a serial killer of Ultra Conservative radio personalities.  I found it interesting that the quote at the beginning of the book says: "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." (Noam Chomsky).  A  really interesting and suspenseful read; an interesting mix of contemporary politics mixed with a fictional FBI protagonist hunting a mysterious murderer.  I am so looking forward to reading all the books and surprisingly it's not an overdose of politics because some of the issues chosen are more obscure and some remedies definitely I haven't heard of.

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