After months of knitting and crochet it’s now time to send off our teeny, tiny creations to the Irish Premature Babies Charity.
Didn’t we do well?
Our Preemie Collection
In addition to all of the items pictured there are still some to collect and add at the shop but for now our totals are as follows –
Hats & Bonnets = 228
Cardigans = 180
Blankets & Sleep Sacks = 140
Booties & Socks = 13 pairs
There is also a little Paxton sitting on the side here knitted by Dina, awaiting sleeves which will be completed by the end of the day (yes I’ll be doing it).
I’m so very proud of how many items we’ve managed to collect and want to extend a huge message of thanks to all of you that gave your time, your creativity and your yarn to make the delicate, little creations. It’s great to see how much the collection has inspired so many of you and I know there have been a good few ‘retired’ knitters that have been persuaded to pick up their needles once again and knit for this charity.
I’d also like to say a big Thank You to the East Cork Journal for promoting our collection in their newspaper, the article really helped to highlight the charity.
I understand the charity are sending all of the donations to one warehouse, where they plan to sort through them and divide them up into hampers. These will then be sent to the hospitals around the country. The charity intend on having the parcels to the hospitals for World Premature Baby Day on November 17th.
A big thanks once again to all of you that helped with this collection and if you couldn’t do something this time, maybe we could persuade you to pick up you hook or needles for our next collection? (more info to come very soon)
As some of you are already aware, we were contacted back in May by Mandy Daly the Family Liaison Manager with Irish Premature Babies, Ireland’s only charity supporting families in Ireland with premature babies.
Each year, over 4,500 babies are born pre-term, and many require very long hospital stays and suffer lifelong complications as a result of their early arrivals.
The charity works hard to raise public awareness of premature birth and arranges several public events every November 17th to celebrate World Prematurity Awareness Day. This year the charity is participating in a global initiative and is hoping to turn many Irish landmark buildings purple (the worldwide colour of premature birth). It also wants to engage in a photography project where it plans to photograph a washing line of baby socks in front of these landmarks.
The charity also wants to donate preemie baby clothes (knitted and crochet hats, socks, cardigans, etc) to the various neo-natal units countrywide. This is where we come in.
Our collection for The Chernobyl Children’s Trust has come to an end; items are being collected later this week. This means we can put all of our efforts into this campaign now. Items can be worked in knitting or crochet and the charity has said all colours are acceptable. Of course they have to be soft yarns, that goes without saying, but the items really can be every colour under the rainbow. Fantastic, if like me you get tired using the same colour, if however, you do have any purple or white yarn lurking around in your stash the charity would love the odd item in these shades to follow their theme.
There are obviously quite a lot of sites online with patterns for preemies in addition you might already have some paper patterns that include preemie sizes. 16″ is newborn and 12″ and 14″ are classed as preemie.
Pattern Sites
While looking for free patterns on the web, I discovered lots of broken links and many sites suggested a ‘donation’ for their patterns.
Ravelry contains well over 2,000 knitting/crochet preemie patterns, with approximately 1,500 of them available free. I assume some of them can also be found on the other sites listed.
I think this site is one of the best for free patterns, it has links to some of the more popular patterns on the net. There are hats, booties, cardigans and blankets. I had a good look through the patterns and the yarns used range from 4ply through to aran weight. They are all knitting patterns though
Hopefully, there are a good few patterns there for you to get busy creating for the latest charity collection. Ideally all items need to be in for around the second week in October to enable them to be sorted out and dispatched to the hospitals for November 17th. You can forward them on directly to the charity or hand them to me at the shop to go off with ours.
If you need to know any more information please email me.
After months of knitting and crochet it’s now time to send off our teeny, tiny creations to the Irish Premature Babies Charity.
Confessions of a Fibre Strumpet 