Crafting for Charity: Crafted With Love

Crafted with Love is a small online completely no-profit shop I just found the other day that sells handmade goods to benefit animals – in this case, no-kill animal shelters. In fact, it was begun to help one group in particular, Action for Singapore Dogs which helps stray and abandoned dogs in (you guessed it) Singapore. Incidentally, I quite agree with what the charity says on their home page – “A pet is not a toy. Think before you get one.”

All handcrafts are donated and all proceeds go to the shelter. They raise quite a bit of money each month – $150 to well over $200, and it’s been going on for some time. There is a lot of jewelry there, and I think one of the founders has a special line she makes for the group. Quite a few artisans participate – I found myself wondering if any also participated with Etsy for Animals (they’re linked as a friend on their blog). The picture there on the left is a fabulous pair of earrings up for sale. They have books! Locket books!! (I do love books, these may be mine.)

Crafted with Love has a Flickr profile, a mailing list and a blog to help people keep up with what they’re doing. Reading back through the blog it looks like they interview contributors, talk about charities and report on their successes.

Find more information about this group either on the blog or in the store.

Crafty Critters – I see myself!

Joy from the Best Friends Network wrote and said she found my entry about a project I found on the Crafty Critters community from back in January! I hopped on over and there was my site! I hadn’t seen it because I’ve not been as internet-vigilant lately, but over the past few months I’ve visited the community a fair piece.  It’s pretty obvious I love animals, so I’ve visited there for good crafty-animal-charity ideas.  Plus I just like the idea of the Best Friends network a lot.

Speaking of this, I’ve been working on some pet blankets (one project of many, as usual) from the many, many, many scarves that my dog and my mother-in-law’s dogs get at the beauty shop. Although I’m sure our dogs would like the blankets, they already have a lot of junk.  I decided instead to give the blankets I produce (they’re kind of crazy quilts) to shelters.  I had to stop working on them for a while, though and WASH them thoroughly again because of the overwhelming baby perfumey powdery scent they put on dogs.  Ick.  Had to get rid of it.

Joy even sent best wishes for my little Caper. I’ve been feeling pretty sad about my kitty as he slowly gets sicker, and it was really, really thoughtful of her to mention him (*sniffle*sniff*). Thanks, Joy

Quilts & Heritage

For some reason, when I started doing posts about crafting and charity, I thought I might run out quickly. Ha! Crafters are one of the more charitable groups of people I’ve ever seen, there’s always someone wanting to get involved and use his/her skills for someone else. Knitting/crocheting and quilting alone gives me an endless supply of possibilities, not to mention the folks who sell their goods for charity.

My recent rediscovery of my Amish-inspired quilts prompted me to take a look at heritage quilts and heritage projects about quilts. Quilts are a very versatile medium, capable of depicting almost anything in fabric and thread (and other mediums, too). They are also a very practical medium. Everybody needs a blanket, so in tough times when other sorts of means of expression were out of the question due to resource and time constraints, quilts were often the method by which people’s creativity shined through. Quilts were a way to make something beautiful, to tell women’s stories, to record and commemorate important events like weddings, to bring together varied groups for social interaction, and of course to use up scraps that couldn’t be wasted to boot.

As a once-frontier nation, American has a huge quilt history. In fact, quilting was really quite altered when it traveled here, and became something it hadn’t been before.

I’ve discovered there are some organizations dedicated to preserving the history of quilting. There are a lot of resources available through these organizations for learning about quilting.  Today I’m highlighting the national Alliance for American Quilts.  This is a treasure trove of information about quilts and quilters.  The Alliance is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving quilt heritage.  They run a variety of efforts designed to foster knowledge and preserve history.  The operate in partnership with others, including museums, educational institutions and local quilt organizations.

The Alliance has A LOT of projects going, and has partnered with a number of organizations to bring this effort to life.  I’m impressed at the variety of efforts and the real effort toward preservation and information outreach.

1. The Center for The Quilt Online is the Alliance’s home for outreach and education.
2. Quilters’ S.O.S. – Save Our Stories is a project to get and save the stories of contemporary quilters.  Operated with the Center For The Quilt at the Center for American Material Culture Studies, University of Delaware.
3. Quilt Treasures: is an oral history project about 1960s and 1970s quilters. Operated with the Center For The Quilt at the Michigan State University Museum and the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.
4. Boxes Under the Bed™: is an archival effort targeting quilt ephemera – patterns, letters, and other related items.  Pending partnership with the Center for American History, University of Texas.
5. The Quilt Index is the educational effort of the Alliance, and operates alongside MATRIX, the Center for Humane Arts and Letters OnLine and the MSU Museum based at Michigan State University, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Illinois State Museum, the University of Louisville Archives and Records Center, the Tennessee State Library, the Library of Congress American Folklife Center, The Kentucky Quilt Project, Inc., and Quilts of Tennessee are all Index partners.
6. H-Quilts is the forum of the Alliance for sharing information about the Alliance’s ongoing work.  This effort is conducted with the American Quilt Study Group and MATRIX, the Center for Humane Arts and Letters OnLine.