Today, I want to share about prayer shawls. Nine years ago, a prayer shawl ministry was formed in our church, St. Bartholomew faith community in Wayzata, MN. They announced that if you are interested to crochet or knit, you can join in the ministry, even if you don’t know to do, they would teach you. When the ministry was formed, 7 or 8 people joined and most of them were well experienced knitters.

To be honest, I have never really knit before I went to the first meeting. The experienced knitters in the group were kind enough to teach me to knit. It looked fairly easy, but initially I couldn’t do it fast enough.

The next week, I went to the library and looked up some knitting books. There I read about the continental method for knitting. This was much easier for me because the way you hold the yarn is similar to the crochet hold (I learned crochet during my school days from aunt Mary. I am always thankful for her). I think the continental method of knitting is much faster than the English method. Now a days I hold the yarn to my own comfortable way.

For most of the prayer shawls, I cast on 63 stitches and mostly knit straight through. I rarely do any fancy stitches. Most of the times, I use homespun yarn from Micheal’s or the yarn provided from the prayer shawl ministry. Also I knit back loops so the shawls will be little stretchy.

Most of the times, the prayer shawls I knit go to the Church, but sometimes I knit the shawls for my friends’ parents when they visit America. The church payer shawl ministry donate them to the needy, we don’t know who is getting the shawl, but knitting the shawl for the unknown has always been pleasant.

Below is the prayer, that I saw in a Pinterest post, which really captures the intentions behind the prayer shawls.