Lydia Likes It

Welcome Blanket, Part II

Sometimes, it's hugely satisfying to put two and two together. Ever since 2017, I've been crocheting Welcome Blankets for donation to refugee and immigrant families coming to the United States, and sending the blankets to Texas or Florida or somewhere along the Southwest border. Last year I learned of a local group of crafters who meet once a month at a library near me in the Boston area to spend an hour working on their Welcome Blankets, and discovered that a nearby neighbor was collecting and storing the blankets at her house. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if the locally-made blankets could be donated to a local nonprofit organization? After I made a few initial inquiries, it turned out that I wasn't the first one to have this thought (surprise!), and in short order a connection between the International Institute of New England, which resettles refugee families, and our local Welcome Blanket group was cemented. My husband Ted and I provided the transportation for more than 60 blankets from storage to recipient agency. Now the blankets are on their way to new homes, and more blankets are in the works for another collection later this year.

Welcome blankets

For the past, oh, five years at least, I've been crocheting small blankets shaped like giant granny squares, for donation to refugees and immigrants arriving in the United States. These Welcome Blankets are part of a large project created by Jayna Zweiman, an architecturally-trained multidisciplinary designer and social entrepreneur whose work is about civic intimacy, accessibility, and joy. Perhaps best known for her Pussyhat Project, an international network and movement of women’s rights supporters, Jayna has become a leading advocate of using design innovation to enact social change. The Pussyhat Project became a worldwide phenomenon at the 2017 Women’s Marches as one of the largest crowd-sourced art advocacy projects ever (I made 15 hats for the Washington DC march). Welcome Blanket, which began as a reconceptualization of the 2000-mile length of the proposed border wall as a 2000-mile length of yarn to make individual welcome blankets for new immigrants coming to the US, has been so successful that the project has expanded to reframe the 24,901 mile Earth’s circumference as a distance that connects us all. My choice of a crocheted granny square pattern honors my own grandmother, an immigrant from Poland in the early 20th century, who taught me to crochet this pattern when I was eight years old.

Hat Not Hate

When you're bullied as a child, the hurt stays with you for a lifetime. The owner of my new favorite yarn and craft store turned me on to Hat Not Hate, an anti-bullying project created by a woman who was bullied as a young girl. Knitters, crocheters and loomers have crafted more than 65,000 blue hats to be distributed to school kids in time for National Bullying Prevention Month in October. There's plenty of time to join in. Make any style hat, in any shade of blue. Find instructions, advice, and a list of drop-off locations on the Hat Not Hate site.