A New Appeal

I’ve been mustering my thoughts & photos for a nice, long What-I-Did-On-My-Holidays post, but events which have been so far running rather vaguely in parallel universes (accounts…tax return…Woolfest stall applications…forthcoming exhibition…commissions…) have converged.  I have realised with horror that it all has to happen in the same universe at the same time.   So that post will have to wait, but here is something which can’t and it would be wonderful if anyone woolly out there can help a little bit.

June & I are co-ordinating an appeal for pure wool baby blankets on behalf of Jane, a Cumbrian doctor who works at a hospital in the mountains of Pakistan.  This is what she has asked us:

“I do hope your knitting group will make baby blankets for our hospital.  We have about 8 births every 24 hours and they are all poor and in difficulties after the earthquakes 3 years ago now, but still they cannot afford to rebuild their houses.  We try to give baby clothes and a blanket to each new baby.  I gave out 350 blankets last autumn and we get 6ft of snow in our valley.  Tents and half-built houses are NOT GOOD for babies.”

Jane is coming back for Christmas and it would be wonderful to have a big parcel for her to take back to the babies.  The deadline for things reaching me is 30th November 2008.

The blankets should be about 30″ x 36″.  We will very happily take squares too – either 6″ or 4″ in double-knitting or aran weight wool.  Newly-made baby clothes are also welcome.  The VERY IMPORTANT requirement with both blankets & clothes is that they are ABSOLUTELY 100% PURE WOOL AND NOT IN ANY WAY SYNTHETIC.  The reason for this is that they don’t need the stuff to be machine-washable, but it MUST be warm.  It is freezing in those mountains.  If acrylic gets wet it is useless, whereas wool dries out quickly and still retains some warmth even when wet.

Here’s June’s useful way of making a square which turns out properly square without having to keep counting your rows:

(1) Start with one stitch (2) Work in garter stitch (knit every row) (3) Increase one stitch at the start of every row until sides measure correct length (a useful thing to do is make a template out of paper or card the size you want your square & use this for measuring) (4) Knit one row without increasing (5) Decrease one stitch at the start of every row until one stitch is left, then fasten off & weave in ends.

We’re also on the scrounge for any pure wool that might be going spare to make blankets ourselves.

If you’d like to help, please do drop me an email at blankets@johnbyhall.co.uk.  (I’m good at replying, so if you don’t hear from me within in a couple of days, please try again – my email is being a bit dodgy at the moment) or message me, Caecilia, on Ravelry.   I know it’s a bad time of year for this, when everyone’s busy thinking about & making gifts for Christmas, and those of us who work in wool get swamped with commissions, but if we can get 30 squares, then that’s one blanket, which is a whole load better than no blanket and will make a huge difference to a baby!

This isn’t the first appeal I’ve done for Pakistan.  After the big earthquake, I found myself in a flurry of sock-making.  A little girl on the television had mentioned how all the children’s feet were freezing in their mountain village.   After about a week of phone calls & emails, I managed to find one aid ship going to Pakistan for Feed the Children who would take any socks I could collect, so I started a local appeal.  Thanks to Rachael who got the word around, it went national (& even international) and I collected over 200 pairs of socks and about 50 other things like hats & jumpers, which was fantastic.  These were all the socks – the final one frantically in production:

Any why does Pakistan seem in particular to matter for me?  There are, after all, so many vitally important causes out there, all wanting my money, time & effort.  Whenever I hear of Pakistan, I think of Naseem, my neighbour in Oxford and one of the kindest people I’ve ever met.   I’ve lost count of the times there would be a knock on the door and one of their children would be there, clutching a bowl of delicious curry, “My mum thought you would like this”.  If they heard we had guests coming, a bag of freshly-made samosas would appear.  Naseem had been incredibly skilled at crochet, as well as embroidery, but had almost lost her sight by the time I knew her, but she loved to talk about the things she had made in the past and was teaching her children to do.  It was very sad leaving them behind when we left the city.  They had been planning for a long time a trip to Pakistan to see family and I heard that at the time they finally got there, the earthquake happened.  They were, thankfully, unharmed, but decided to move to Pakistan permanently.  So we have lost touch, but I think of Naseem often and hope she & her family are safe and warm.