Happy Kansas Day!

Today is the 150th Birthday of Kansas. I've fully embraced being an Alaskan, but I'll always be a Kansas girl at heart. At school we always celebrated Kansas Day with an assembly and Kansas Cake (cake baked in the shape of Kansas, very easy - bake a rectangular cake and cut the upper right corner off). You know it is a real holiday because there's a dedicated dessert.

On January 29, 1861, Kansas joined the union after a long and bloody struggle that would eventually spill over into the rest of the country and the Civil War. 150 years later, it’s still an amazing place.

So here are a few fantastic Kansas facts for you:

• State song: Home on the Range
  
• State flower: Sunflower
  
• State Motto: Ad Astra Per Aspra (to the stars through difficulties)
  
• State animal: Great Plains Bison (buffalo)
  
• Some Famous Kansans: Amelia Earhart, Dwight Eisenhower, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, Buster Keaton and Charlie Parker
  
• Kansas is home to the geographic center of the contiguous United States.
  
• The very first female mayor in the United States was elected in 1887 in Argonia, Kansas.
  
• Pizza Hut was founded in Wichita, Kansas in 1958.
  
• And Kansas has the largest ball of twine in the world in Cawker City, Kansas with a circumference of over 40 feet and still growing!
  
• Kansas has been scientifically proven to be flatter than a pancake.
  

To celebrate Kansas Day, I made (and am still making) Kansas dishcloths. These are going to lucky fellow Kansans as gifts (though some may not get them for a few weeks). I love knitting dishcloths and often in the lure of "sexier" knitting and crocheting projects, I forget about the simple joy that is creating a dishcloth.

Kansas Dishcloth:

Original pattern: Knitted Kansas Cloth; Yarn: Lily Sugar'n Cream in Yellow

I made a few modifications to make the picture look more like the map of Kansas (and I might do some more modifications to fix the "S", if I do, I'll post the changes). I don't think the original looked much like Kansas - just changed a few rows. Every other row I knit according to pattern instructions. Also I lightly steam blocked this (by hovering my iron and pushing the steam button but not actually putting the iron to the dishcloth) so it would look better for photography and gift giving.

Dishcloth modifications:
Row 29: k3, p3, k25, p3, k3 (basically just starting the repeat for the "body" of Kansas a row earlier)

Row 47: k3, p3, k24, p4, k3
Row 49: k3, p3, k23, p5, k3
Row 51: k3, p4, k24, p4, k3