Charity, Ravelry-Style and Crochet Guild-Style
I logged into Ravelry a couple of days ago and was greeted by the recent Ravelry update (This Week in Ravelry #8), which happened to feature/lead to several charity thingies… (thingies is a technical term).
Generous Ravelers
If you have a Ravelry membership (sorry, this won’t work if you can’t log in), then check out the Vintage Crochet for Charitable Giving article. For example, I’d like to note this paragraph:
In 1916, the Home Needlework Magazine frequently included articles with “small things to make” for church charity fairs. Popular items were crocheted, because – it was explained – “crochet is so popular.”
Yay, popular crochet! Crocheters are generous! Anyway, the article goes on to list a bunch of threads about what Ravelry members are doing for charity! Very nice.
Crochet Guild of America / Charity Section
While I was reading, I found the following link for people who crochet, which lists a whole bunch of crafting for charity projects from the Crochet Guild of America. There are 82 projects/charities on there right now, although their links could use a cleanup. Some examples are …
- Angels for Hope sent 68,871 butterflies, angels and smiley faces to people in need of hope (people who are injured or ill) in 2007.
- Needle Arts Mentoring Program of the Helping Hands group pairs adults and youth to encourage building bridges across generations through the needle arts of knitting and crochet.
- Project Hope Afghan is a group focusing on cancer patients at M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston, TX (I think I picked this because I used to work across the street). It started in 1997 - don’t know if it’s ongoing, but hey, this sounds like the Share A Square project, eh?
Back from the brink
I really should’ve listened to myself when I said I shouldn’t be posting last week. Turns out after the conference ended I just crashed. I got pretty sick, an extended episode of feverish, tired I-don’t-want-to-movitis. I got grumpy, and lost all my energy, I’m still not out of the woods. I hope my coworkers didn’t notice how out of sorts I was (by me biting their head off), because I genuinely was at my wit’s end.
Nevertheless, I did do some things, and I’m now at halfway with my flowered afghan (I took a break from stitching the other) and am doing a couple of small things as well.
But mostly, I’m just going to rest a lot more. Oh, and I had a chuckle at Etsy’s Error page, which I got for the first time the other day. Have you seen this? Hee hee. I do love a clever error page. And I do love Link.
I should not be writing this post
This morning at 5:30 a.m. when in the grips of an insomnia so irritating as to actually get me out of my warm bed, I decided that I would swear off the internet forever. I was going to delete every vestige of all my online accounts, and erase every bit of me in the ether!
I think it goes without saying that I am not very at all rational in the early morning before noon. I’m still not really sure why I thought this was a good idea, other than that I was exhausted, grumpy and needed a nice hot shower and a cuppa joe.
I’m not yet over conference-malaise, and I should just go to bed, and that’s not really too far off. I just want to go to bed late enough that I can sleep for a good 11 hours tonight straight through.
So in this week’s now-typical style, I present various things running through my head:
1) Remember that picture I showed you of the woman knitting socks in the SXSW panel? Well, I posted that picture to Flickr, and lo and behold she left a comment! It’s Julia aka Yarn Maven from Bastrop, Texas. I didn’t get a chance to get her name in the panel because I got caught up talking to the two founders of BurdaStyle, but I’m so glad to meet her. 
2) I do yammer on sometimes about advocating buying handmade stuff. But it’s only because I really like it. Fun thing about buying things I might make myself - still useful, but this way I get to enjoy others’ design aesthetics as well. Here’s my latest purchases.
On the left is the orange Bouquet wall clock for Jeff’s study from Decoy Lab. He’s been on an orange thing recently, looking for accessories. Orange is a great accent. As seen on February’s Poppytalk selections.
On the right is a sewing case I bought for taking embroidery stuff along with me. It’s from Blue Banana Shop in Singapore, whose stuff is very bright and cheery.
Pay no attention to my strange collection of books there. I just realized what those were. This is part of my collection of academic books on the old Testament. The one on the far left, Paul the Convert, was written by a professor for whom I was a teaching assistant, my favorite professor from grad school, the inimitable Alan Segal.
