The Guild is often asked to help out with knitted items for charity and other special campaigns. Guild members have regularly donated knitted items for the Caroline Chisholm charity and The Asylum Seekers Resource Centre. In 2015 the Guild participated in two charity campaigns to raise awareness for a cause. The first was the Little Yellow Duck Project for the Royal Children’s Hospital to raise awareness of organ donation.
DonateLife Week was held in August 2015 and is a national awareness campaign to promote organ and tissue donation in Australia. The Little Yellow Duck Project involves people handcrafting little yellow duck gifts as random acts of kindness that are left in public places for others to find. A special tag on each one invites the finder to take their gift home and to visit the projects website to register where they found their gift. The Royal Children’s Hospital aimed to raise awareness of the life saving gift of organ donation in a child friendly way, in keeping with their patient’s at the Hospital.
Guild members knit over a dozen ducks that were used in the campaign. If you would like to participate in the Little Yellow Duck project any time, visit the project’s website for a selection of patterns and instructions on how to get involved.
The second campaign was for the Alannah & Madeline Foundation (AMF) for a Christmas campaign that they organised to thank the donors that support the Foundation. The AMF charity, which started nearly 20 years ago, is committed to keeping children safe from violence. The AMF requested that Guild members knit some purple hearts that would be finished so they could be used as a christmas decoration. The AMF was delighted with the response and received 216 hearts from the Hand Knitter’s Guild and a total of 1,100 hearts for their campaign.
We couldn’t participate in these projects without the help of Guild member’s. Our thanks to them for their contribution and for representing the Guild so generously.
Handknitters Guild 