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by Knit Picks Staff on May 11, 2011
This past Friday, I had the honor and privilege to visit with a woman named Peggy Adams from Doernbecher Children's Hospital in Portland, Oregon. Peggy works as the Child Life Specialist in the Family Resource Center and is working hard to arrange a program for the parents of children to participate in while their sons and daughters receive treatment. I reached out to Peggy a couple weeks ago because I thought she might know of some local charities who might benefit from yarn donations. After speaking with her for a few minutes, she mentioned that she was in the process of starting a knitting and crochet class for the parents of kids at the hospital. |
Category Archives: charity
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by Stacey on April 6, 2011
Most of you know me as the Independent Designer Partnership Coordinator (quite the mouthful of a title isn't it?) but another wonderful part of my job is working with local charities. While most of our yarn stock is in Ohio, we do end up with quite a bit here in Vancouver - leftovers from projects or photoshoots mostly. Lots of people ask what we do with all of it - and no, we don't take it all home with us. We actually donate all of our discontinued yarns & colors it to a couple of lovely local places. One of those places is Friends Of The Children, a nonprofit group in Portland that provides the most at-risk children with intensive and long-term mentors. We've worked with them in the past and they have a group called "Crafty Friends" that loves playing with our yarn & teaching children (and mentors!) to knit or crochet. Since we are discontinuing a bunch of colors right now to make room for our fall stock, I went down to the small warehouse we have here to load up a box for our Friends. That box turned into two.. |
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by Knit Picks Staff on February 9, 2011
Funny Alisha mentioned hats and charity in her last post - those two things are near and dear to me! In fact, at the end of January, I shipped off 25 little baby hats to a local medical charity. All of these hats are made out of Swish Worsted (except for three - one in Stroll and two in Comfy). They are super simple, quick and cute, and use only a little yarn. All of the yarn for these was scraps from other projects that would have been destined for the garbage or a long, lonely wait in some random scrap bin. But, I saw other potential in the yarn. Even a few grams would be enough for a stripe in a hat this small! Over the last few years, I've slowly amassed a pretty good collection of these scraps, and have found that charity knitting is the perfect use for them. Got scraps? Keep reading for a free baby hat pattern! |
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by Knit Picks Staff on February 7, 2011
When I took this job at Knit Picks, I knew pretty instantly that knitting was going to quickly become one of my new favorite hobbies. Since completing my first hat a couple of weeks ago, I have already made another one and started on a third. The first two were just my way of testing my skills and trying out new stitches. Because they are a little too big for my head, I have decided to donate them to charity in hopes that they will keep someone else's slightly larger head warm in this winter weather. The one that I am working on now is the first one that I am using a pattern on and I am really excited to see the end result. In case you didn't see a picture of my first hat on our Facebook page, here's what it looked like: I unfortunately haven't captured a good picture of my second hat yet but here is what it looked like in the process: My third hat is a cloche pattern that I got from Ravelry. The pattern link is here: Cloche Hat So far, I have just completed the brim section but I hope to get a good start on the body of it tonight. My new-found love for knitting is starting to rub off on others in the office and a couple of people have even stepped up and finished projects that they were working on for quite some time now... |
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by Stacey on December 20, 2010
This time of year, no matter what holiday you celebrate (or if you celebrate one at all), I think it's pretty natural to look back about the past year and see your successes. All of us at Knit Picks and Crafts Americana had a great year here and are so happy to be be doing something that we love ...which makes us want to share our joy with our local community! Angela, Alisha, and I have been going through our catalog samples over the past month & finding local charities to donate them to. We found a bunch of charities - some of which members of Crafts Americana volunteer their time at - and we are so excited to share them with you. |
