Thank you to all of you who left comments! (And by the way, welcome to all my first time commenters!) You make me so happy!

Without further ado, the winner is: Laura! Congratulations, Laura, I will be in touch to get your address.

Wool and Company has raised nearly $26,000! Thanks to many of you.

One thing I love about artists and crafters is they are so good at thinking up fun/interesting/creative ways to help those in need. Here are a few links for ya:

Amy pointed us to Craft Hope, which has a lot of great stuff to look at and buy (and has raised over $20,000.)

Beth let us know in the comments that she is having a giveaway too. Go!

And here's another great tidbit, via Ysolda. I'm sure you already know that many pattern designers are donating 50% of their pattern sale profits through 1/31. But did you know that you can search your own queue on Ravelry and find all the patterns that you want to make that are tagged "help for Haiti". Go to the main pattern page and see the Haitian flag at the top right of the page-click to see all the patterns available, and you can filter that by your "favorited" patterns or queued patterns. Rock on.

Why not go ahead and buy up all the patterns that you intend to buy eventually anyway--when you can do it NOW and make a difference is somebody's life?

I'll be back soon (maybe even today) with knitting. xo

Giveaway for Haiti

Hello, my friends! What can I say....2009 in a word: BUSY.

Last year is a blur. A crazy, sometimes good crazy and sometimes TOO crazy, blurry-blur-blur.

I had big plans for January. Turn the page; a fresh clean sheet of paper. Everything was going to come into focus. Long, quiet days with no committments. Lots of me-time. Sewing projects, organizing my knitting, working on quilts. So far, however, the blur continues. Organizing, cleaning, doing taxes, and getting sick, all are competing for space on that fresh, clean sheet of paper that was supposed to be January.

Every now and then I get the urge to slap some fabric on something and sew it down, which accounts for a couple of quick projects like the heart t-shirt, above. However. Nothing substantial to report.

Contributing to the general inability to blog has been the past week of sadness/guilt watching the tragedy in Haiti and realizing how little they have/had even before the earthquake, and how much I have. So much in the family, health, and happiness department, not to mention the yarn and fabric department, and that isn't even mentioning the basic food and shelter department. So much.

I finally decided to end the blog silence AND do a little something, both at the same time.

First of all, I'd like to bring to your attention the Help Heal Haiti by Knitting Campaign going on by my friends at Wool and Company. Every dollar that you donate to Doctors without Borders on Wool and Co.'s website, will be matched by Knitting Fever. How awesome is that. So far they have raised over $9,000. (So, really $18,000.)

Maybe you already gave to one of the many charities and that's great. Maybe you already gave to Doctors without Borders through Wool and Company and that's also great. Maybe you are like me and gave a little last week, and now that you are continuing to follow the reports you are realizing with a heavy heart how very, very long term this situation is, and you decide you need to give more.

So, here's the deal here on my blog. All you have to do is leave a comment and let me know that you contributed in your own way to Haiti. You don't have to tell me where, and you don't have to tell me how much. It is an honor system, people! Just leave a comment, letting me know, and you will be entered in my little drawing to win both these skeins of yarn:

Sophie's Toes Sock Yarn in Chelsea (top) and Layers of Color: Royal (bottom). Each one, 350 yards of hand dyed merino goodness. There are so many great colorwork patterns out now, I was thinking these would make a really pretty Aestlight shawl (see on Ravelry all the pretty ones with 2 colors), or Akimbo, or Selbu Modern, or many many mitten patterns, or then again, you could go crazy and make yourself a coupla pairs of socks!

I know these will go to a good home. Comment between now and Saturday morning. I will draw a winner Saturday around noon, so check back by Sunday for the winner.

Thanks for reading! And now we return to more photos from our new t-shirt photoshoot--Sophie is always happy to oblige when there is a camera in my hand...