A while ago I posted about an idea to sell my crochet hats for charity.  As a result of that post I had some orders.  The hats take around 4 hours to make each (longer when I get distracted by things like eating and going to work) and it became pretty clear that I wouldn’t have time to make a heap up to create the black market I had planned.  Instead, I sent an email to a few work friends, received some specific orders and got crocheting (15.5 made so far, 2.5 left to go.  I never want to make an owl eye or a dinosaur spike ever again).

Then I realised it was time for some December Secret Bakering, so on Saturday I got baking too.  Not at the same time as the crocheting.  That would have been a disaster.  And frankly, it was a disaster without additional help…

I started with some raspberry vinegar at around 11am (this wasn’t for the office).  By 11.30am I had smashed a glass bottle, filled the house with smoke and perfected the art of holding a saucepan of boiling fruit vinegar as I turned off the smoke alarm for the FOURTH time (I couldn’t put it on the hob as it was covered with smashed glass…)

I won’t go through the details but things continued to go wrong.  Right up until 9pm when I finished and realised that I’d covered my kitchen with a weird sort of icing that had set like concrete and needed a brillo pad and serious elbow grease to remove.  So after 10 hours of baking I picked up my crochet again.  You get the idea.

Anyway, I left a note this month with the baking.  It said:

Some very lovely people donated pennies and I’m rather pleased with how much we’ve raised between us for Crisis.   And there is still a little more hat money to come :o)

Crisis are a great charity that help homeless people all year round, but over Christmas do amazing things with the help of volunteers so that rough sleepers get to take part in Christmas in the warm.

I can’t offer you readers anything in return (now you know the level of my cooking disasters you’d probably opt out of that one anyway) but if you’ve not been stretched to the limit with donating to other charities this year, you might like to donate a few pounds?  Maybe the equivalent of that box of chocolates you know you probably don’t need on Christmas day or the coffee you treat yourself to on the way to work?  If we can reach a total of £218.40, that’s 10 people who will be in from the cold over Christmas, given somewhere to shower, have a health check and all sorts of other things we take for granted.  Take a look here for more information.  Even better, I can get what I raise doubled by the company where I work, so we could help 20 people between us!

If you can, the Just Giving page is: https://www.justgiving.com/pog123  And if you’re short of time, you can donate £3 just by texting POGS99 £3 to 70070

I say you’ll get nothing in return, but you will get to make me smile, in the way I hope I’ve made you smile a few times over the year reading this blog.  Is that a fair swap?  :o)