Lebanon Valley Knit2Gether Guild

Warm up America has a request.

Note - if you choose to make and send dishcloths to this organization, please also report them to WUA using the local donation form in the Guides tab. Thanks. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/qYmG6Da3nK8N2sMb/

We have knitters. We have a weaver. We have a spinner with a helper. We have a crocheter. We have a needle felter. Want to learn? We can help

World wide knit in public day!!

Living the best life in Mt Gretna at the hall of philosophy and knitting and crocheting.

Fabulous company! Fabulous weather and no dropped stitches

For those who don't have to haul things. For those who don't want to be in the chaos of the expo center.

Here's the schedule for bussing

Knitting meets mechanical engineering:

Mechanics of knitting | Penn Today Randall Kamien of the School of Arts & Sciences and Geneviève Dion of Drexel University share how combining traditional origami techniques with modern textile science can lead to practical applications in various industries.

https://www.facebook.com/share/17dfR94MS1/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Marta Voss was 61 years old when the Gestapo came to her door in Copenhagen, 1943.
She offered them coffee.
She was, by all appearances, exactly what she seemed: a retired schoolteacher, arthritic hands wrapped around knitting needles, a half-finished wool sweater in her lap, a cat on the windowsill.
The officer scanned the apartment. Lace curtains. Dried flowers. A shelf of primers.
Nothing here.
He left without touching his coffee.
What he had not looked at — what no one ever looked at — was the sweater.

Before the occupation, Marta had taught geography to children for thirty-one years. She knew the coastline of Denmark the way she knew her own hands. Inlets. Sandbars. Tidal patterns. Water depths. The narrow sound between the Danish coast and Sweden that, at its thinnest point near Helsingør, stretched only four kilometers.
Four kilometers of black water separating her country from freedom.
When the roundup orders came for Danish Jews in October 1943, the resistance needed one thing above all else: a way to coordinate the boats.
Not radios — the Germans monitored frequencies constantly.
Not written maps — paper could be searched, seized, used as evidence.
They needed something that could sit in a woman's lap in plain sight while a Gestapo officer drank coffee three meters away.
Marta volunteered before anyone asked.

Her system took two weeks to develop and could not be explained in words. It lived entirely in her hands.
Knit stitches represented open water. Safe passages.
Purl stitches were obstacles. Patrol routes. Shallow sandbars where boats grounded.
Yarn color shifts encoded timing — how many hours before a patrol returned to a given point.
Cable crossings marked the rendezvous coordinates where fishing boats waited offshore.
Dropped stitches, which any observer would assume were simple errors from arthritic fingers, indicated German vessels anchored in specific positions.
Each finished panel — a sleeve, a back panel, a cuff — was a navigational chart.
A woman would carry it folded in a basket to a fisherman's wife. The fisherman's wife would sit with it for an evening while her husband memorized the route. In the morning, Marta's knitting returned, and that night another family reached Sweden.

The rescuers called her Strikkedamen. The Knitting Lady.
She sat in the window deliberately. Visibility was protection. An old woman who hid would attract curiosity. An old woman who knitted in plain view of the street was furniture.
Twice, German soldiers stopped to ask what she was making.
"A sweater for my nephew," she said both times. "He is always cold."
They laughed at her gauge.
One suggested she use thicker needles.
She thanked him sincerely.

In seven weeks, Marta produced nine navigational panels. The rescue network used her routes to move more than four hundred people across the sound without a single boat lost to a patrol.
After the war, historians documented the Danish rescue as one of the most extraordinary civilian operations of the war. Nearly seven thousand Jews reached Sweden alive.
Marta's contribution appeared in no official record.
She had asked it that way.
"The fishermen deserve the credit," she told the one researcher who found her in 1971. "I only told them where the water was."
She died in 1979. In her apartment they found three unfinished sweaters on her needles. A young textile historian who happened to be present recognized something unusual in the stitch patterns.
She spent a year decoding them.
They were maps.
Not of the Danish coast.
Of escape routes she had designed and never used. Backup plans. Contingencies for rescue networks that, in the end, had not been needed.
She had kept knitting them anyway.
Just in case.

There’s a Pennsylvania Fiber Quest all around the state that began on May 1 and continues through October 31:

payarnquest.com Explore Pennsylvania’s yarn shops, fiber farms on the first PA Yarn Quest. Travel, collect stamps,win Prizes and celebrate local fiber from May–October 2026.

And string theory is close by....

Stash Sale
Thursday May 14 - Saturday May 16
10am-5pm
Please share this post with your local friends. Or better yet, give them a call and make plans to shop together.