Chemo Cap 2

As an update to a previous post, a while back my friend sent along a pic of her little one in the green tasseled hat I made for her.  I'm glad it looks as cute as I had hoped it would!

As for more recent projects, a friend, J, asked for hat donations for another friend of hers who is going through chemo treatments.  I have no idea who this woman is, but I decided that spending an hour or two knitting a hat for the friend of a friend is the least that I can do.  I had seen a really cute hat knit-up at the local yarn shop, one that used perled ridges around the sides of the hat.  I couldn't find exactly the same pattern, so I tried it on my own.  It didn't come out quite how I had hoped -- the one I saw had fat ridges where the knitted "valleys" in between disappeared, leaving the look of stacked rings on the outside of the hat.  I guess you get that with ribs where the perling is wider than the knitting.  I did 4 rows of perling followed by 4 rows of knitting, and the ridges just don't have the same effect.

Mildly ridge-y hat

A better shot for the overall shape and colors

I then accidentally threw it into the dryer for a few minutes, which helped define the ridges a bit more, before I put it in the mail.  (It was on a table waiting to be sent out -- some laundry ended up on the table on top of it -- I needed to get the wrinkes out of said laundry before work one morning, so everything got tossed into the dryer for 10 minutes -- don't judge me, okay?  *smile*)  I just hope that the woman I knit it for will like it, since I know absolutely nothing about her personality or tastes.  If she hates it, then maybe it can be her backup hat for when she doesn't want to actually leave the house, or something.

So that makes 2 hats I have knitted for people I don't know personally in just the past few months.  And now I have found out that a close friend of mine in CA has also just been diagnozed with breast cancer.  She's a knitter, and is surrounded by my old knitting friends from CA, so making a hat for her doesn't seem like the right thing to do to show support -- she will have plenty of hats if she wants them.  I wish that I could send along something else that will be unexpectedly useful, but having no personal experience with a friend or family member going through chemo treatments in the past, I don't know what else will be a good idea.  Whenever I make a baby gift, I like to send along some practical things, like baby lotion, wipes, washcloths, etc.  But I'm not sure what kinds of practical things can be of help to her.

Does anyone have suggestions about what else to send in a chemo care package?