HELLO!

And it's been an age!  I have completely disappeared up my own backside these past few years blog-wise.  Life is good, mostly, same old same old and there's a proper update in the near future I promise.  I did transfer within Greggs to a shop closer to me and it has its ups and downs-I'm often so tired that I have very little energy left for crochet and while my crochet group does still meet up, I can't make it down very often and we haven't really had a joint project for a while.  The last few projects we've done have been for Woolly Hugs, who are a fantastic group and well worth supporting as they do a lot of different blanket charity ventures to get involved with.  My issue is that they only accept blankets made with Stylecraft Special DK and they have a very specific palette for each project.  Whilst I understand the reasons for this, it does mean that when I'm trying to de-stash, I want to be able to use up what I've got and in whatever colours I have-Woolly Hugs is something I tend to have to buy yarn for...

So here's the point of this post!  I am attempting to have a declutter and actually get rid of a lot of the yarn I have before I allow myself to buy any more.  I have a lot of bags in the spare room of yarn that was meant to be for certain projects that never worked out (case in point to follow), I have two large bags of pastel/pinks that a friend passed along to me as she was moving house and needed rid of it and I've had a lot of squares kicking about that were meant for blanket projects that again never really worked out.

So over this past week, I have gone through the bags and pulled out all the squares (and there were quite a few!) and so far I have made THREE decent sized lapghans with them!  I also dug out a project a friend asked me to undertake a year or two ago and turn a whole bunch of sample/scrap/practise crochet and knitted pieces of all different sizes (these were made by a dear friend of hers that passed away from cancer) into a blanket-this has been my nemesis for a while but these past 7 days has seen me tackling that too and today it was finished!  Just need to weave some ends in and then it's ready for her....

Sorry!  I digress...back to the point!

My plan is to work through this yarn and make 30 blankets for 6 different charities.  So far, I haven't decided which charities specifically but I want to donate 5 to a nursing home; 5 to a neonatal ward; 5 to hospice care; 5 to foster kids/ kids in shelter; 5 to cancer patients and 5 to bereaved parents (for this, I'm thinking of Cwtch of Comfort of course)  So here's the thing.  I'm positive I've got enough yarn here to do this so please, please, I'm NOT asking for squares or yarn or even for donations from other people as this is a personal goal.  But I would like your recommendations/suggestions of places in the UK (preferably South Wales) to donate to.  And if you like this idea, please feel free to bust that stash and set a goal!  I'll cheer you on all the way :-D

I have three blankets so far to start off with-I'll take photos to share with you as soon as I can!