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Fort Vancouvers Knitters Guild

Thirty -Five Years of Proud History

It was in the late 1980’s. Ronald Regan was then President; the Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded; the Berlin Wall came down and Sandra Day O’Connor sat on the Supreme Court, the first woman in history to do so. Amid these iconic moments came the birth of the Fort Vancouver Knitters Guild.

October 17, 1988, marked the first time a group of local people got together with the purpose of forming a guild for knitters in southwest Washington. They met in Beryl Nelson’s shop, Knit Pickin in Vancouver. Then Nora Kegals held a December 7 knit-in at her home.

Three weeks later on Dec 27, forty letters of invitation went out. Just one week later on January 4th, 1989, the new Guild came together for its first organizational meeting. The members established monthly meetings to be held on the first Wednesday of the month. The Guild stayed fairly informal to begin with, but when Judie Stanton became president in 2009 she set up standing rules--we use those to this day.

In the middle years of our history, much of the Guild’s time and energy went to a major project partnered with a well-known historical entity located here in Vancouver, the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Over the years the Site has held reenactments in Autumn and at Christmas time featuring local actors/interpreters in period dress. Guild members knitted the proper accessories to wear with those costumes. These knitted items included shawls, scarves, hats, mittens, fingerless gloves and muffatees (wrist warmers with a slit for the thumb). Along with the knitting, our Guild also donated most of the yarn which was 100% wool in period appropriate colors. The project was a huge success. If you attend one of these wonderful reenactments at the Fort, be sure and watch for our period knit-wear worn by the participants!

By the year 2000, we began to hold weekend workshops, and toward the end of the decade when Judie Stanton was Guild President, we put together our first weekend retreat, held in a motel at the end of Main Street in Manzanita, Oregon.

The local yarn shop at the time got us a retail space for pizza Friday night after we visited the shop. Then on Saturday evening we all met in Judie's room which had a small deck on the ocean side. We all recall late member Lynn Fike and her husband, Mr. Fike (as she called him) telling us the story of a family sailing adventure in the Puget Sound. They were both gifted storytellers, and had us all laughing until the tears fell.

More recently we added another retreat location, Our Lady of Peace in Beaverton, Oregon. The number of members attending the retreats grew, and eventually we decided the invite the Tigard Knitting Guild to join us to form a joint Guild retreat.

Over the past five years our Guild has been deeply engaged in giving to others through knitting. We are proud to share our dedication to the community through the following past donation projects. Information on our current projects, and a chance to donate to these projects can be found on our Giving Through Knitting page on this website.

From 2017-2021 we have given:

100 knit caps for the seagoing mariners who land in the Port of Vancouver during Christmas week, through the International Mariners Organization.

100 Purple knit hats for Peace Health Hospital's Shaken Baby Syndrome program so that 100 infants born at the hospital received a purple hat, symbolic of the Period of Purple Crying prevention program.

100 knit hats for the Vancouver Veterans Hospital walk-in clinic.

25 knit washcloths and 25 lap blankets for the terminally ill veterans in our region living at home.

Over 150 pieces of clothing, including new shoes, men's jeans, and over 200 hats and scarves for the Affiliated Tribes of America to provide clothing to those Native Americans in our region who lost everything in the 2017 Autumn fires in central Oregon.

Over 100 knitted knockers (ongoing) for the local cancer clinics for women who have undergone mastectomies to provide something lightweight to fill their bras instead of the heavy silicon ones provided by the hospitals.

500 hand-knit hats, scarves, socks, mittens for the Fort Vancouver Food Pantry to help our local friends and neighbors, Christmas 2021.

Hundreds of hand-knit soap sacks (ongoing) to the Shower Outreach Program to make sure all of our local citizens who live outdoors can enjoy a shower with their own bars of soap.

40 hand-knit Sensory Muffs to a local nursing home for their dementia patients. These muffs stimulate their senses through the placement of tiny bells and other sensory objects on the muffs, which they wear also for warmth on their arms.

Hand knit newborn hats, sweaters, blankets to our local hospitals to provide layettes to new mothers of limited means.

See our Giving Through Knitting page for information and donation opportunities on our current projects.