Blanket Bee for Project Linus – Sept 27

My quilt-in-progress for Project Linus

Project Linus Blanket Bee
Date: Sunday, September 27
Time: 12pm – 5pm
Location: All Pacific Fabrics stores

Project Linus is a national organization that collects handmade quilts for children in need. The quilts are brought to area hospitals, summer camps and anywhere children need the special warmth of a handmade quilt or blanket created by a network of “blanketeers.”

Pacific Fabrics in Seattle is holding a Blanket Bee to put together quilts for the Project Linus organization. I attended the bee last fall, and I can’t explain what a great event it is. I met some amazing people who craft simply and quietly for children in need.

You don’t need to know how to quilt to help at the Blanket Bee. If you can tie a knot, you can help hand tie quilts! Hope to see you there!

Don’t fence me in

This amazing fence art project was led by Outdoor Knit to bring attention to an empty, deserted lot in her neighborhood.

The saddest part is I think many neighborhoods (I can name a few in Seattle – ahem Pike & Pine) have spaces like this just sitting there with their coldness sucking the life out of a community. Many are staying empty for a long time as developers abandon shiny condo projects.

And when citizens have real ideas to at least have some temporary events to bring some life to the dead concrete lots, it’s hard to understand why cities just fence ’em up for years!? Grrrr…

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Crafty goal

Remember when I posted about the Warm for Winter handmade hat and scarf drive and said if we started making one item per week until the September 15th deadline that we’d each be able to help 17 people? At the time, I didn’t actually make the commitment to start crocheting, so I didn’t actually start crocheting.

Now it’s time to commit.

My new crafty goal:
Crochet 20 items (hats or scarves) by September 15th.

I’ve calculated that I’ll need to make about 2 items per week and so far I’m about half-way done with my first scarf…

Hopefully I’ll have some pics of finished projects projects posted soon!

Volunteer your time to make hats and scarves

Just got an email from the Warm for Winter campaign. It’s time to start crocheting and knitting those hats and scarves for their annual handmade hat and scarf drive. Last year they received 5,967 items!

This year, the goal is to collect over 1,000 hats and scarves by 11/15/2009 (Pacific Fabrics will be collecting again). According to the Warm for Winter website, “The number 1000 represents the number of housing units needed to be created each year to successfully tackle homelessness in King County.”

If you could make a hat week between now and 11/15, you would be able to help 17 people stay warm this winter.

I know it seems strange to think about in this 90 degree weather, but tanning while crocheting sounds fun to me. I’ll be hosting crochet/knit social this fall so stay tuned!

Watch: Crocheted coral w/hyperbolic geometry

Finally some math & science cred for crafters. Watch this TEDTalk by Margaret Wertheim who is leading a project bringing attention to coral reefs, mathematic figuring and other brilliant endeavors – using crochet of course. Crochet is the ONLY way to accurately recreate hyperbolic shapes in the real world – who knew!

Get the patterns! You too can create your own crocheted coral. Patterns created by “In Stitches” for the Sydney reef project are availabe here.

Via Mashable

Crafters shop local

Fabricshoppersunite.com has launched a new database (in Beta) aimed to help cratfy guys and gals make more of their materials purchases from independent quilt and fabric stores.

Says Project 95, “Did you know that 95 percent of fabric shoppers make their purchases at chain stores? That’s right, only 5 percent shop independents. Let’s change that.” I think everyone knows that shopping inide and local helps communties flourish, but it’s not always easy (I heart Target…).

The site lets you search by area and locate shops on a handy Google map. I quickly located my favorite indie shop in Seattle – Stitches. I wanted to see if could find some in Paris too. Imagine visiting an indie fabric store on you next vacation! You’ll need to know a zip code to get the map going, but I still wasn’t able to find any places in Paris – yet. The project has just released in Beta and I’m excited to watch it evolve.

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