One thing that’s good about taking several weeks to traverse the Midwest with friends and family? Lots of knitting time! And between the cabin and the trip to Chicago, I got tons of knitting done!
First up? Fourteen squares, crocheted while riding on a boat, waiting for the rain to stop, and driving to and from the cabin over the 4th of July weekend!
Patterns vary, and all came directly out of whatever my little brain desired to make at the moment. All will head to the Ghana Project, where they will be added to blankets.
Next up is a tiny orange sweater, which will be donated, along with the brown sweater below, to Sara and the auction she’s having at the end of August. My cousin’s wife, Sara helps run a charity foundation and does amazing work with kids in the Chicago-land area!
pattern notes: the hat is a pattern I came up with, and still needs a few tweaks. The sweaters, on the other hand, are both 5 Hour Baby Sweaters (Ravelry link), a pattern I now know completely by heart and love dearly. Great for stash-busting, these sweaters use up a full skein of worsted weight yarn, and are perfect to either donate or gift to a new mom!
Finally, I started to do some more work on holiday gifts, working through two scarves.
Made using the Just Enough Ruffles pattern (Ravelry link), I made these scarves on slightly bigger needles than called for, to give them a slightly airier look. I’m in love with it, but also know I’ll probably size down from 11’s to 10’s (the pattern calls for 9’s, so I’m still above gauge) as I make a dozen or so more of these.
Not to be left behind, this gorgeous blanket is working its way closer and closer to the halfway point. A gift for a friend who’s about halfway through her first pregnancy, this bad boy should match the nursery perfectly, and will be ready in plenty of time to welcome the new babe! The pattern is the Project Linus Security Blanket from Knitting For Peace (Ravelry link), and I’m absolutely in love with it. Definitely one to keep perpetually on the needles!
What have you been working on during your summer vacation? I’d love to see … share links to your blog, Flickr page, and more in the comments!
Are you one of the millions who stayed awake well past their bed-times last night to be at the midnight premiere of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince? If so, please don’t rub it in – with all the time off I’ve taken to vacation across the Midwest lately, I couldn’t take the morning off to catch up on sleep, so I’m one of the millions more who will see it this weekend.
This latest installment in one of my favorite series’ of all time has got me thinking about hand-knits, however. I know, shocker. Like many crafty HP fans, I’ve picked up books on HP knitting projects, found free patterns online, and imagined patterns based on items I’ve seen in the movies but have yet to find patterns for.
So in the spirit of one of my most beloved book and movie series, I present to you some amazing Harry Potter knitting (and crochet) patterns!
Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That's one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media. Below is a list of 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you. If you can think of any other ways to help charities via social web tools, please add them in the comments. If you'd like to retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.
1. Write a Blog Post
Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days -- whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you're passionate about, you're helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential. Recently, a group of green bloggers banded together to raise individual $1 donations from their readers. The beneficiaries included Sustainable Harvest, Kiva, Healthy Child, Healthy World, Environmental Working Group, and Water for People. The blog-driven campaign included voting to determine how the funds would be distributed between the charities. You can read about the results here. You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.
2. Share Stories with Friends
Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you've gathered a social network. You'll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.
3. Follow Charities on Social Networks
In addition to sharing links to articles about issues you come across, you should also follow charities you support on the social networks where they are active. By increasing the size of their social graph, you're increasing the size of their reach. When your charities tweet or post information about a campaign or a cause, statistics or a link to a good article, consider retweeting that post on Twitter, liking it on Facebook, or blogging about it. Following charities on social media sites is a great way to keep in the loop and get updates, and it's a great way to help the charity increase its reach by spreading information to your friends and followers. You can follow the Summer of Social Good Charities:
Another way you can show your support for the charities you care about is to rally around them on awareness hubs like Change.org, Care2, or the Facebook Causes application. These are social networks or applications specifically built with non-profits in mind. They offer special tools and opportunities for charities to spread awareness of issues, take action, and raise money. It's important to follow and support organizations on these sites because they're another point of access for you to gather information about a charity or cause, and because by supporting your charity you'll be increasing their overall reach. The more people they have following them and receiving their updates, the greater the chance that information they put out will spread virally.
5. Find Volunteer Opportunities
Using social media online can help connect you with volunteer opportunities offline, and according to web analytics firm Compete, traffic to volunteering sites is actually up sharply in 2009. Two of the biggest sites for locating volunteer opportunities are VolunteerMatch, which has almost 60,000 opportunities listed, and Idealist.org, which also lists paying jobs in the non-profit sector, in addition to maintaining databases of both volunteer jobs and willing volunteers. For those who are interested in helping out when volunteers are urgently needed in crisis situations, check out HelpInDisaster.org, a site which helps register and educate those who want to help during disasters so that local resources are not tied up directing the calls of eager volunteers. Teenagers, meanwhile, should check out DoSomething.org, a site targeted at young adults seeking volunteer opportunities in their communities.
6. Embed a Widget on Your Site
Many charities offer embeddable widgets or badges that you can use on your social networking profiles or blogs to show your support. These badges generally serve one of two purposes (or both). They raise awareness of an issue and offer up a link or links to additional information. And very often they are used to raise money. Mashable's Summer of Social Good campaign, for example, has a widget that does both. The embeddable widget, which was custom built using Sprout (the creators of ChipIn), can both collect funds and offer information about the four charities the campaign supports.
7. Organize a Tweetup
You can use online social media tools to organize offline events, which are a great way to gather together like-minded people to raise awareness, raise money, or just discuss an issue that's important to you. Getting people together offline to learn about an important issue can really kick start the conversation and make supporting the cause seem more real. Be sure to check out Mashable's guide to organizing a tweetup to make sure yours goes off without a hitch, or check to see if there are any tweetups in your area to attend that are already organized.
8. Express Yourself Using Video
As mentioned, blog posts are great, but a picture really says a thousand words. The web has become a lot more visual in recent years and there are now a large number of social tools to help you express yourself using video. When you record a video plea or call to action about your issue or charity, you can make your message sound more authentic and real. You can use sites like 12seconds.tv, Vimeo, and YouTube to easily record and spread your video message. Last week, the Summer of Social Good campaign encouraged people to use video to show support for charity. The #12forGood campaign challenged people to submit a 12 second video of themselves doing something for the Summer of Social Good. That could be anything, from singing a song to reciting a poem to just dancing around like a maniac -- the idea was to use the power of video to spread awareness about the campaign and the charities it supports. If you're more into watching videos than recording them, Givzy.com enables you to raise funds for charities like Unicef and St. Jude's Children's Hospital by sharing viral videos by e-mail.
9. Sign or Start a Petition
There aren't many more powerful ways to support a cause than to sign your name to a petition. Petitions spread awareness and, when successfully carried out, can demonstrate massive support for an issue. By making petitions viral, the social web has arguably made them even more powerful tools for social change. There are a large number of petition creation and hosting web sites out there. One of the biggest is The Petition Site, which is operated by the social awareness network Care2, or PetitionOnline.com, which has collected more than 79 million signatures over the years. Petitions are extremely powerful, because they can strike a chord, spread virally, and serve as a visual demonstration of the support that an issue has gathered. Social media fans will want to check out a fairly new option for creating and spreading petitions: Twitition, an application that allows people to create, spread, and sign petitions via Twitter.
10. Organize an Online Event
Social media is a great way to organize offline, but you can also use online tools to organize effective online events. That can mean free form fund raising drives, like the Twitter-and-blog-powered campaign to raise money for a crisis center in Illinois last month that took in over $130,000 in just two weeks. Or it could mean an organized "tweet-a-thon" like the ones run by the 12for12k group, which aims to raise $12,000 each month for a different charity. In March, 12for12k ran a 12-hour tweet-a-thon, in which any donation of at least $12 over a 12 hour period gained the person donating an entry into a drawing for prizes like an iPod Touch or a Nintendo Wii Fit. Last month, 12for12k took a different approach to an online event by holding a more ambitious 24-hour live video-a-thon, which included video interviews, music and sketch comedy performances, call-ins, and drawings for a large number of prizes given out to anyone who donated $12 or more.
Bonus: Think Outside the Box
Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created Blame Drew's Cancer, a campaign that encourages people to blow off steam by blaming his cancer for bad things in their lives using the Twitter hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Over 16,000 things have been blamed on Drew's cancer, and he intends to find sponsors to turn those tweets into donations to LIVESTRONG once he beats the disease. Or check out Nathan Winters, who is biking across the United States and documenting the entire trip using social media tools, in order to raise money and awareness for The Nature Conservancy. The number of innovative things you can do using social media to support a charity or spread information about an issue is nearly endless. Can you think of any others? Please share them in the comments.
Special thanks to VPS.net
A special thanks to VPS.net, who are donating $100 to the Summer of Social Good for every signup they receive this week. Sign up at VPS.net and use the coupon code "SOSG"to receive 3 Months of FREE hosting on top of your purchased term. VPS.net honors a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee so there's no risk.
About the "10 Ways" Series
The "10 Ways" Series was originated by Max Gladwell. This is the second simultaneous blog post in the series. The first ran on more than 80 blogs, including Mashable. Among other things, it is a social media experiment and the exploration of a new content distribution model. You can follow Max Gladwell on Twitter. This content was originally written by Mashable's Josh Catone.
i feel like i have been vacationing for several years now. in reality, it's only been two weeks, off and on, but with all the driving under our belt, it feels longer.
in a good way, not a bad way.
chicago was amazing - amazing food, amazing times reconnecting with friends, simply amazing. if you're ever there, be sure to head to Tizi Melloul, have dinner and say hey to the owner - he's my cousin (although i didn't get a picture).
there's really nothing like my husband, wearing my scarf and his shades, laughing and loving life with some of our dearest friends. we miss you already chicago!
I don’t talk a lot about my faith here – how it has shaped who I am, how I view the world, and why I do what I do. But make no mistake about it, my faith is important to me. In the coming weeks and months, it may take a more prominent role here, as I open up more about how my beliefs have influenced how and why I craft.
Some of you may have heard about a conference that is going on in Minnesota in October. Christianity21 is set to be a group of 21 speakers, talking on 21 topics, for only 21 minutes each. It will take a look at how Christian faith is changing in the 21st century, and all the speakers will be women.
Far from being a “women’s conference” however, this should be an amazing time of connection and growth, and I’d love to attend. Many of the voices and topics listed speak deeply to my soul, and I'd love to be sitting there, taking notes to share with all of you on what is being said and thought. However. (and isn’t there always a “however”?)
However, this conference is far-ish away from my home, and costs money. Two things that don’t match up well with my current budget. Fortunately, the conference is giving people a way to get discounts on things like fees and hotels and such. If you are someone who was already planning on going, when you register, can you enter the code “craftivist”? this will start a tracking thingie, and if enough people I know use it, I’ll get free admission!
Now, here’s the thing. Don’t sign up and do this if you’re not actually going, and don’t feel like you have to go just because I want to – if I don’t go, the world will not stop. I figure, however, maybe some of you are thinking of going? And maybe some of you haven’t registered yet? And so maybe – just maybe – I could manage to get there as well!
For those of you who are curious, I'll be using Sundays for the forseeable future to explore this whole spiritual side of myself more. The weekdays will be for craft, make no mistake about it, but Sundays will become a place for me to highlight some of the women speaking at this conference, my thoughts on their topics, how faith has steeped my life, and more. Hopefully you'll enjoy this step as much as I will!
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