Do a little good!

Fancy using your crochet or knitting to help someone tiny and precious? Here's just the thing: the Neonatal Centre & Special Care Baby Unit at Coombe Womens' and Infants University Hospital are looking for teeny hats and blankets. Can you help? One of our loveliest customers, Clare, who's clareblove on Ravelry, recently started a thread in the Dublin Knit Collective forum over on Ravelry asking for wee hand-crafted contributions. There's a good bit of discussion over there, but here's the main points. The Unit has an ongoing need for very small hats and blankets to keep their little patients warm. They don't reuse articles from one baby to another because of the risk of cross-infection. They're specifically asking for 30cm square blankets (that's 12" in old money) or a wee bit larger, but the Unit's patients include larger babies too, so if your blanket is a bit bigger than that it'll still be most useful. Hats are needed in a range of sizes too - from the very tiny (13cm/5" in circumference, 8cm/3"long) right up to a newborn size of 35cm/14" around and 15cm/6" long. We've all got small amounts of yarn left over from other projects, and this is the best imaginable use for it - the Unit has no preference as long as it's machine washable (this makes life much easier for hassled parents doing the patients' laundry at home). Your finished hat or blanket should be washed and each one put in a ziploc bag before donation. If you're looking for a hat pattern to follow, then Ravelry has more than you could ever imagine. You know how swatching advice is always to make a good big square? A good big square sounds like a tiny blanket, doesn't it? What about making a 30cm swatch the next time you're making a garment, and once it's done its tension-measuring work, it can go on to have a useful life as a blanket. And if your pattern needs a swatch in the round? That's a hat right there! We've got another drop-off option too - if you want to drop your hat or blanket into us here at This Is Knit, we'll make sure it gets to its rightful destination. And thank you!