We’ve used the past four Give Back Sundays (our monthly all-welcome, free-of-charge, community-building knit group) to focus on our knit-sock challenge. Now with the August event coming up this Sunday, we want to highlight another way our staff uses the fibre arts to give back. Our store manager Sarah is set to spend her summer participating in an annual Craft-Along for Desert Bus for Hope.

Desert Bus for Hope is a Victoria-based organization that hosts an online fundraising marathon where participants broadcast themselves playing the world’s most boring video game non-stop. During this time they also participate in challenges, accept donations, and auction off geeky gifts created during the Craft-Along in order to raise money. All donations go to Child’s Play which is a Seattle based charity dedicated to improving the lives of children in hospitals by providing them with toys, books, and games.

As part of the Craft-Along people from all around the world create artwork based on games, books, movies and other fandoms to be auctioned off. The call for crafters goes out in May and all projects need to be submitted by the end of September. That’s plenty of time for smaller projects, but Sarah has been crocheting donations for the Craft-Along since 2014 and every year her projects are becoming bigger and more elaborate. The past two years she made queen sized blankets based on video games! This year she’s using Uptown Worsted to make another but she won’t tell us what design the finished product will feature. See if you can guess what it will be from the sneak peek of what’s she’s finished so far:

Sarah will be sweating away to finish her blanket by the end of the summer. If you want to join us to do some charity crafting of your own, stop by the shop for Give Back Sundays this Sunday August 12th between 1-3pm. We’ll have donated yarn for you to work with and plenty of project ideas, including our stretch goal of collecting 39 additional pairs of socks for the knit-sock challenge which we’re planning to donate to the nearby Franklin Street temporary modular housing project!