Warm Up America

Earlier in this Blog, I had promoted the Caps to the Capitol campaign. They have posted on the Warm Up America site that they have received caps: 281,000 for the Caps to the Capital Campaign. It was an overwhelming success thanks to your generosity. The caps are being distributed to Save the Children's health facilities in Bangladesh and Malawi. For detailed updates at every step in the journey, go to www.warmupamerica.org site. They still have patterns available: Newborn Cap Patterns and Links to Technique Information and encourage you to knit caps for your own local neonatal unit of your local hospital.

If you want to keep on helping through the Warm Up America and be sure that your efforts are going to a good cause: visit their site for "directions" on making 7" x 9" rectangles that you can either put together yourself and send in, or send in the rectangles for their volunteers to put together into afghans.

The Warm Up America group does encourage crafters to donate their work locally. They seem to have lots of resources available so you can find a place near you to give. This seems to make a lot of sense in that it would be better to not spend the resources on shipping knit items around the country any more than necessary. Locally / Globally .....

Which brings me to one of my more persistent conundrums: Shipping: Why can I walk into any local store, and buy an item that comes from half a world away so cheap? How can it make sense to ship fruit here from, say, New Zealand? If energy is so costly (on so many levels), how do we keep this up? The raw materials come from one place, ship to the manufacturer of the base materials, ship to the fabricator, ship to the finisher, ship to the packager, ship to the importer, ship to the warehouse, ship to the distribution center, ship to the distributor, ship to the retailer, then maybe ship to me at home? It's just amazing to me. How many people (or conveyors or robots) handled that little bag of grapes that I bought at the store? Grown in Chile'. Why? How does that make any sense?
OK, I know. Enough already.