The Warm Hands Network - A Community Partnership: September 2019

Saturday, September 14, 2019

Hawaii! And Burlington!!

Hi Everyone, we had a great Packing Night on Sept 6! Six of us were there at the new(ish) WHN World Headquarters, aka Anita’s house.

As you know, we have a shipping deadline of October 15 and this get together was to get a jump on packing and sorting what has been coming in over the summer. There were many (many!) generous boxes and packages of beautiful hand knits/crochets and it is so amazing to be able to see all the incredible warm items and the artistry and talent that goes into making them. Packages had been sent from as close as across town in Ottawa, and others that had journeyed from Japan and Hawaii! We truly are an amazing network! All the Packing Night crew just love seeing (and patting) the beautiful gifts from your needles and hooks. We can’t thank you enough for all you do to share your time, your energy, and your generosity with Warm Hands.

At Packing Night, we have a system. We open all the boxes and parcels that have been arriving since the previous Packing Night. We do a quick check for quality and ensure that pairs are tied together so they don’t get separated in transit. We lay the items out separately by each contributor, take photos, and write a description so we can match up the right photo with the right name. We then sort the items. Lastly, they are placed into vaccum bags which are sealed and then the boxes are sealed, ready for shipping.

We ended up this night with three boxes complete and a fourth mostly full, but waiting for a few more to be sealed for shipping. We counted up all the items for the first time (usually we just weigh the boxes when they are shipped: we will continue to do that) and by the end of the night we had over 475 items!!!

This included:

18 sweaters and vests

131 hats including balaclavas

96 Neckwarmers

133 pairs of mittens

8 slippers

74 pairs of socks

16 items in sets (8 sets of hat/mittens or hat/Neckwarmers)

The blankets had already been bagged ready for transporting to Larga Baffin so I didn’t count those but I think there were at least over half a dozen, and some sweet baby items as well.

We also had a good discussion over pizza and cake about options for potential new partners and campaigns. Early days yet of course, and will keep you informed as we explore what is possible.

One change for the blog format that we wanted to share with you: taking the photos of each individual parcel is the most time-consuming part of the evening and creates a big bottleneck for the packing process. This actually is a VERY good thing in a way – it really emphasizes that we have many generous knitters and crafters! However, now that so many people are sharing their project pictures on Ravelry and other social media – which were not as prominent when WHN first started over 10 years ago – we are going to move to another model. After today, instead of taking individual pictures we will be taking “action shots” from Packing Nights so that you still get a flavour of the evening. And we will still provide the first names and locations (or Ravelry names if applicable), so that folks know their packages arrived.

And now, on to the photos!