Relay For Life 2013

I'm still playing catch up...

Last year, I participated in my second year of Relay For Life.  My sister and I captained a team called "Just Keep Swimming" at the Relay For Life of Pasadena.  It was exhausting, fun, and above all, rewarding.  If you don't know what Relay For Life is, it is a 24 hour walking relay fundraiser to raise funds to fight cancer, to raise awareness, and most importantly to honor survivors and to remember all of those lost to cancer.  For me, I relay in memory of my dad, as well as other family and friends that we've lost.  I also relay to honor those that have made it through their fight. There are Relays all over the world, so chances are there is one near you. I would definitely recommend checking it out.  http://www.relayforlife.org/

Anyway, for our team we did some booth decorations, as well as gave away ribbons and sold lap bead lanyards.  Here are some pictures:

Ribbons that we gave away, each ribbon color represents a different type of cancer, or a survivors. The banner was made with a half of a twin bedsheet (from Walmart) and some fabric paint.  And the fishes were made with paper lanterns, googly eyes and cardstock.

One of the most moving and special parts (in my opinion), is the luminaria ceremony.  These are some of the luminaria bags that our team created last year.

This year will be my 2nd year being a team captain, and my 3rd year of Relay.  If you'd like to support me and/or my team, we'd really appreciate it.  If you're in the area and would like to join us in the relay, come and join our team.  Every step and every dollar is just that much closer to a cure.

http://main.acsevents.org/goto/fe-georges

2013 Crafting for Charity: Blanket #2 and #3

I did it!  I took sort of the easy way out and did a couple of quick crochet around fleece blankets, but these are the last two blankets.  They are warm and soft and I hope it gives whoever receives them some comfort.

I'm preparing the package and sending it out soon to Project Linus. :)

Note to self:  Making the Crafting for charity month = to the shortest month of the year??? Maybe not such a good idea!

On to National Craft Month (March).

Happy Crafting everyone!

2013 Crafting for Charity - Blanket #1

Tomorrow is Make a Blanket Day for Project Linus.  I thought it would be a great time to update my status on my goal of 3 blankets.

I first started crocheting a blanket.  It was turning out nice and thick.  Unfortunately, I ran out of the yarn I had planned to use.  I know I could have kept on crocheting with a different yarn, or buy another yarn, but I scratched the blanket as my first and decided on making it a rug instead.  Check it out:

So, as of early this week I was at 0 of 3. :(

Luckily, I had a backup plan of an easy blanket to make using fleece.  Here it is:

It's a super simple method to make the finishing fringe.

1.  Cut the corners (I remove a 4" x 4" square from each corner )
2.  Cut strips.  I used a piece of painters tape 4 inches from the edge as a guide of how far to cut.  In this blanket I cut about 1.5" strips.
3.  After cutting the strips, snip a small hole just above the middle of each strip.  When you get to the corner, don't share the hole for the two corner strips.  IMO, it just doesn't look right.
4.  Fit the strip thru the hole from the bottom of the blanket and pull.  Now do that for each hole.

And there you have it.  Finished and super simple.  1 of 3.  I hope to create another one like this tomorrow for Make a Blanket Day.  How is your charity crafting going?

Crafting for Charity Month 2013

As you may have noticed, I didn't do the "Pledge for Beanies" this past season.  Mostly because I decided that the time of year was too busy for me to make what I could.  Upon evaluating it all, I decided  on a few changes.

1.  I will call it "Crafting for Charities Month" instead of "Pledging for Beanies."   This gives more variety on what I might do each year, as I can do Headhuggers one year and Project Linus the next.  Spread the Love, right?

2.  I decided to change the length of crafting for charities to one month instead of two.  This is more on a trial basis.  I may consider doing two non-consecutive months.

3.  The charity we will support or craft for will change from year to year (reason for name change).

4.  The Crafting for Charity month will be in February (at least this year, we'll see how it goes for next year).

With February off to it's start, I wanted to kick off the 1st Crafting for Charity month of Rad Linc Crafts.     This month, I will craft for Project Linus.  I'll be making various blankets to send to them.  I may look make some similar to the ones I've posted before.  My goal is to make at least three blankets before the month is over (February is kinda a short month).

I encourage you to join in with the crafting.  I'd love to hear who you are crafting for this month.  Feel free to send me a message (f t c a n o n AT g m a i l DOT c o m) (or you can post it on facebook) with what your crafting and I'll mention it on one of my future posts this month.

Happy Crafting for Charities. :)

New Charity Links page

Another Quick post to mention that the charity links page on Rad Linc Crafts is live:

http://radlinccrafts.blogspot.com/p/charities.html

Have a look, get inspired, and spread some light. :)

Pledging Beanies

Last week, through an email chat with my good friend and loom knitting buddy, I decided to make a pledge to make as many beanies as I can from now (Dec 1, 2010) till the end of January (Jan 31, 2011) for donation to headhuggers.

Headhuggers is a project started by Sue Thompson, who accepts donated handmade beanies and caps (sewn, crocheted and knitted), and distributes them to hospitals and oncology offices, etc to patients who may have lost their hair due to chemo or any other reason.  The beanies and caps will help keep their heads warms because of all the suffering they already go thru, a cold head shouldn't be one of them.

Last year, I teamed up with a friend who wanted to learn how to loom knit and we managed to finish 5 to send to Headhuggers.  Sue was super nice to send a letter to me, thanking me for the caps, and explaining to me where they were being sent to.  Our caps ended up helping out a burn center in San Francisco.  It felt awesome to be able to help them out.  So, this year, another friend and I are going to team up to make more beanies.  With the winter months upon us, I'm sure the beanies will be much needed.

So, I thought I'd make a pledge to you all that I will make a total of 10+ beanies for the next two months for headhuggers.  I figure that this way, I can't back down.  It's official and failing is just not an option. ;)  Plus, I get to help more people which is a reward in itself.

I'll try to keep you up to date on the beanies that I make. The picture above are some beanies made in the past.  I forgot to take a picture of the ones we donated. D'oh!

If you're interested in donating handmade beanies, check out the headhuggers site: http://www.headhuggers.org/  You'll find info on the project as well as a lot of cool patterns.

Happy Loom Knitting, Crocheting, Knitting, or Sewing. :)

Charity Baby Blanket - Granny Hexagon

Here is the second charity baby blanket I made for Project Night Night.  I call it a Granny Hexagon for the basic reason that I use a regular Granny Square pattern, but added a couple of side to make it a hexagon.

Here's the crochet pattern.

Ch 4. Join with slip st to form a ring.
Rnd 1: Ch. 3 (acts as first dc), 2 dc in ring, ch 2 (3 dc in ring, ch2) 5 times; join with slip st to first dc.
Rnd 2 and so on: Slip st in next 2 dc and in next ch-2 sp.  Ch 3 (2 dc, ch2, 3 dc) in same sp. (Ch 1, 3 dc) as many times as needed til you reach the next corner (on the round 2, this will only be 1 time). For all corners (except the starting corner), do (3 dc, 2 ch, 3dc ) in the same sp.  Continue round after round til you achieve the size of blanket you want.

That's it.  I hope this is right, as it is the first time I wrote down a pattern. Most of it was rewritten from a granny square pattern that I had.

I plan on sending these out in a the near future with the other blanket that I crocheted.
This bubble blanket also would have worked well for this charity.

Easy Crocheted Charity Blanket

Late last year, I heard of a charity, called Project Night Night, thru a twitter post from a fellow crafter.  This charity put together totes of security blankets, books, and stuffed animals to be given to kids that had the misfortune of living in shelters or orphanages.  I loved the idea of giving kids a little something to hang on to.  So, I decided to make a blanket to donate it to such a worthy cause.  This blanket is a very simple design of double crochets. 10 rows of dc for each colored section.  I think it could have used another colored section, but I ran out of yarn. :(  I finished it up with a simgle crochet all the way around. I didn't get to make a tutorial on this, but I thought I'd share the blanket anyway as well as spread the word about the charity. 

If you want to help out, but do not crochet, you can sponsor a package, or even donate giftcards that have only a few bucks left. 

Easy Loom Knit Beanies

One of my new year resolutions this year is to be more charitable. I wanted to put my new found hobbies into good use by helping out others in one attempt to leave this world better than I found it. In looking for a way to incorporate my crafts into a charitable endeavor, I found this program called HeadHuggers, run by a very nice lady, Sue. She accepts handmade caps and distributes them to hospitals all over, for patients who are undergoing treatment that result into hair loss. There are other programs just like this all over the web if you're interested. Here are a few that I found.

HeadHuggers
Knitting Pals By The Bay
Stitches From The Heart
Newborns in Need
More Charity Links


For my first donation of caps, I decided to make a few of these basic beanies using the knifty knitter. Here's how to make it.

Materials:

Yarn - thickness depends on how warm you want it.
Knifty Knitter Round Looms
Blue for infant
Red for child
Green for adult
Yellow for large adult

How to:

1. Tie the yarn to the outside peg. You'll want to be able to take this off so make sure you can do that... I like to do a crochet chain for the hook.

2. With the pegs facing you and the outside peg on top, start doing e loops (loops that mimic the cursive letter e) around each peg working clockwise.

3. When you've completed one full revolution, push down all of the e loops and go around again.

4. There should now be two loops on each peg of the loom. Turn the loom so the pegs are facing outside, and for each peg, start pulling the bottom loop over the top loop and off the peg. Continue this on all the pegs. This is called knitting off.



5. Now there should be only one loop left on each peg. Wrap the loom again with e loops all the way around (like #2). And Knit off again. Repeat til the knitted part is twice the length of the brim of the hat you want. I made the brim of this hat only about an inch so I knitted til it was about 2 inches.

6. To make the brim, you would, pull up the end of the knitted portion and bring the first row of knits that you did above the peg (from the inside).

7. You should now have two loops on each peg. The first row and the last row that you've knitted. Knit this off.


8. Repeat #5 again til you've reached the length of the beanie that you want to make.

Closing using the gather method

9. Cut the yarn, leaving about a 6 inch tail. Cut another piece of yarn, let's say 1.5 times around the loom.

10. Use the needle that was provided with the loom set and thread the 1.5 length yarn thru it. If you have a hard time putting the yarn thru the needle hole, you can use a small piece of tape to flatten the yarn. Afterwards, just snip that small piece off.

11. Use the needle to thread the yarn thru all of the loops on the pegs. You can begin to remove the already threaded loops off of the peg to give you some slack.

12. When all of the loops are threaded and off the loom, invert the hat so that the hat is inside out.

13. Hold one of the yarns that you threaded thru, and pull so that the end bunches together. Tie a double knot tight. Tie a few more knots with the 6 inch piece that was originally cut and the threaded pieces. Cut all yarns close to the knots. I like leaving small tails of about half an inch to an inch.

That's it. Invert the hat and it's ready to go. (Well, almost, I like to wash it first before I give it away)


If you're interested in donating to some of these charities, check out the websites above, they usually have email addresses to inquire more info from. There's much that can be done to help.

For a bit of variation, try a beanie with a visor.

Recommended Products: