I can honestly say that crocheting for charity saved my life, literally. Five, six years ago I was in a very dark place. My son had sustained life-threatening injuries in an accident. I could hardly function for the crying and worrying. Then we got hit with back to back hurricanes. The county flooded. Families had to evacuate. Kids were left with the clothes on their backs and flip flops on their feet. School opening was delayed by a month. It was that bad. We're a small, rural county. People just started pulling together. Wal Mart donated shoes and sneakers to every school aged child. Others donated clothes. I started crocheting. I got out the scraps. I started making hats and mittens. Eventually I concentrated on hats because I could get more hats done in the time it took to make a pair of mittens. Someone saw me crocheting at the library and asked what I was working on. So happens, she was the president of the ladies auxiliary at her church. She asked for donations of scraps and passed them on to me. By the time Christmas came around, I had more than 100 hats that were distributed through the schools. I kept going. I worked like a crazy person for 3 years. It was a mission. Eventually, every kid that wanted one, got a hat. I'd go to Wal Mart to shop and see a kid in a hat I made. It made me cry. It also helped my smile again.

Saypoint, that will be very pretty! As for the price of yarn now, I do watch sales for big projects like afghans. I will say, though, that if it's for a sweater or socks for me or DH, I don't use acrylic yarn, and use a wool or wool blend, which is a LOT more expensive, though I do try to find the least expensive that will still look nice and drape properly for the project. I do quite often pay $20 for sock yarn. BUT I have been wearing the very first pair of sock I made 17 years. So looking at it that way, that pair of socks has cost me pennies per wearing. I do have to repair the bottom of the heels on those and a couple of other pair after catching the bottom on a screw in threshold plates. So, I guess my point is, I don't just look at initial cost, but cost per use, also. Our local knitting circle has participated in Warm Hands, Warm Hearts, a program that was started about 18 years ago by our local hospital's chaplin's wife, who is a long time member of our circle. She is a retired teacher, and had a child who had no hat, so she went home and knitted a hat for that child. It snow balled from there into many knitting/crochet groups making hats and mittens to donate to our local hospitals emergency rooms for the nurses to provide hats and mittens to those who come in with out hats and mittens in the winter. We all look for yarn at yard sales, and often will have it donated to us from various sources. I've even been knitting in the laundramat and been asked if I could use free yarn! The employee had been cleaning out her aunt's home after the aunt's passing, and hadn't been able to bring herself to put it in the garbage. She lived right down the street and immediately called her DH to bring me THREE big garbage bags of clean free yarn! Of course I took it to our next meeting and shared! We also make blankets for local children in distress at a special short term home that takes in children who may be from a single parent home, when that parent can't care for them for whatever reason. Our hospital just put on a thank you dinner for us, and told us we have contributed over 32,000 hand made items in 18 years!

Oh Annie! Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU! ! ! ! You've definitely gone above and beyond the call of duty! I, too, want to learn this stitch, but haven't tried it yet. The instructions and pictures here will help so much! ! I have no idea what I want to make with it yet, but I'll come up with something! My crochet 'skills' aren't good at all anymore, it's been probably 20, maybe more, years since I've done much of it. With the exception of a toddler blanket I made for my newest great granddaughter 2 years ago. I found out real quick on that project just how 'rusty' I am! ! ! Anyhow, there was no Internet available back when I was doing so much crochet, one had to rely on books and magazines to learn new techniques. So I'm finding so many new (to me) stitches, patterns, yarns, etc, it's very exciting. I want to try them all! Unfortunately, I now rely a lot on closed captioning when watching TV, so my crochet time is cut quite short. Thanks again! Rusty

I'm half done with my 6th blanket (Project Linus) plus random baby hats for local hospital and scarves for women's abuse shelter. My stash may not go down for awhile - a friend and I visited some AC Moore stores in the waning days of their closing sale and came away with many bags of yarn for minimal prices.