Crocheting and knitting for charity is an act of compassion and love

Crocheting and knitting for charity, especially for children in need, is a meditative act of love.

More importantly, it makes a difference. There are many millions of abandoned and vulnerable children and AIDS orphans in southern Africa, who live in dire poverty.

Many lack the very basics we take for granted—love, shelter, food, education and warmth.

We support the hard working children's charities, like Hotel Hope, who strive to provide for their basic human needs. Your crocheting and knitting for charity can provide an extra dimension, warmth.

Your contribution of squares to this crochet and knitting project adds to the many thousands of 8"/20cm squares from around the world, which are joined into blankets and distributed to these children.

The finished blankets add more than warmth to the children’s lives. As co-founder of KasCare, Ronda said in a South African press interview:

“ They are a currency we use to tell the children exactly how beloved they are. We tell them they are the future, unique and special.”

As a children's charity, KasCare’s knit-a-square program has two goals:

1. To warm and comfort these children with blankets, hats, vests and pullovers.

2. To raise awareness of this mostly hidden human tragedy.

By contributing, you not only make an AIDS orphan, abandoned or vulnerable child warm, you help too, to bring the plight of the children to the attention of whoever you tell or ask to join with you in this project.

Keeping a child with HIV AIDS warm is vital

We all understand how awful it is to be cold, but many of us have not experienced the misery of being cold all night, every night, hungry, and perhaps sick as well.

Many of the children are themselves infected by HIV AIDS. As it is an auto immune disease, keeping warm helps their ability to stay well.

These small children are lying on a cold piece of lino laid directly over the bare earth. This photograph was taken in March, but in winter, just a few months later, it would be freezing. Now they have been lovingly wrapped in blankets made from squares sent by people like you from all over the world.

Perhaps the most heart-warming outcome of your efforts is that the children receive a hand-made gift which not only keeps them warm but sends them a message, from the world, that their plight is known.

We have a lofty goal
for 2011:

175,000 knitted and crocheted squares representing 5,000 blankets.
5,000 hats and 2,000 garments.

We hope to double that number in 2012. A bonus for the children is the knitted clothes and toys that some knitters send with their squares.

The blankets are so vital. But to see the children receive their first ever toy, and to witness the amazement with which they receive it is heartbreaking and heart-lifting at the same time.

As your squares arrive, they are collected, sorted and bundled into blanket packs by our KasCare Volunteers They then organise sewing and distribution days which are recorded in our regular e-newsletter Square Circle, so you can see and enjoy the results of your wonderful work.

You can subscribe for free in the form on the left.

Here are the instructions for our knitting for charity project and the postal details too.

We look forward to welcoming you to our warm knit-a-square community in the Square Circle Forum to enjoy our knitting and crochet challenges and our friendship and commitment to this shared knitting for charity goal.

Please also join our Facebook Group to help attract more knitters and crocheters.

More hands, more squares, more warm children.