Charity Crafting for Preemies

Our local charity crafting group was two years old early this month. In the beginning, we focused on preemies. That became a real challenge. We learned quickly (well, not quickly enough, as you will see) that not all hospital preemie units are the same. We began in April 2009 and it took us until the end of the year to work our way through all the contacts at each of our local hospitals. In that time, we did not end up finding even one to accept what we had made.

We learned, along the way, that we needed, instead, to find out the needs of each unit. For instance, one hospital, while I stood there, bag of shirts, booties, and caps in hand, explained their needs. They said that booties always got lost in the laundry. They said that they only used little shirts from a particular commercial supplier. They said that they do use hats/caps, but that they had a good supply at that moment.

Finally, we were able to find a home for that first batch of preemie things. A local volunteer group, Volunteer Angels, is headed by a special woman who used to work at our local county hospital, and she was able, through her former contacts, to find a home for our handmade goodies.

Then, suddenly, this past Friday, the hospital that had turned us down last year with all those requirement conditions, emailed me and said they had quite a lot of baby yarn and did we want it. Well, you bet we wanted it. I asked her if they needed any preemie items at the moment. She said, hats. I did not feel right going over and getting that yarn without giving in return, so I whipped up two dozen hats over the weekend, in various preemie sizes. I figured this time around, I wanted to determine their exact needs first, before we went full speed ahead.

We ended up with 16 huge skeins of baby sport yarn. They had purchased it and the only one on their staff who knits/crochets just wasn't using it quickly enough. We have decided to keep this yarn totally separate from all other donated charity crafting yarn, so that we can give back the projects to the place that donated this batch of yarn.

While there, I gave the hats/caps and asked for feedback. My contact took them to the preemie unit, and THIS time, we know exactly what THIS preemie unit needs. In this case, the opening at the bottom is about 4" across, and the hat is about 4" tall. She also mentioned they could use some preemie crib blankies, very small - we agreed on "flat tray table" size, about 18x24-ish.

Anyhow, we learned, the hard way, that when charity crafting, it saves time and aggravation when we find out the needs ahead of time. It also gives us a truly wonderful warm-fuzzy feeling to know these things will honestly be appreciated.