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Dallas Hospital Wants Blankets for Every Baby

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parkland hospital warm up americaParkland Hospital in Dallas is the public hospital for Dallas County, which means they deliver a lot of babies in a lot of different circumstances.

They’re teaming up with Warm Up, America to try to fulfill a great — and big — goal: to have every baby born at the hospital leave in a hand-knit or -crocheted baby blanket.

To that end, Warm Up, America is requesting baby blankets instead of the regular blanket sections. Ideally they say they would like blankets to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 inches square, but if you work in the usual WUA square template you’d end up with a 35 by 40 inch blanket, which would also work. (They don’t mention it, but smaller blankets are great for preemies, too.)

All blankets need to be made out of machine washable and dryable materials for use in the hospital environment.

Check the page linked above for more details on where to send the blankets. And check out my baby blanket patterns if you need inspiration!

[Photo via Warm Up, America.] Looking for more Baby Knitting patterns? Check these out on Etsy.

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Comments

  1. I would like to have the address of where to send the blankets. Please send it to my email address above. Thank you.

  4. This post is from 2014 so I don’t think that particular campaign is still going on. But lots of hospitals accept blankets, so you could start locally and see if anyone is looking for donations.

  5. This project is old, but Parkland can always use blankets of any kind. It is in Dallas you can Google for the address.

Have you read?

Knit a Linen Stitch Hot Pad

Linen stitch is one of my favorite knitting stitch patterns that, every time I use it in a project, I think about how I don’t use it often enough. 

It’s an easy stitch to make, with slip stitches done with the yarn held to the front of the work on the right/front side and to the back on the wrong/back side, which makes the strand of yarn a visible part of the pattern. 

It also makes a fabric that is thick and looks kind of like a woven fabric.

I recently used linen stitch to make a double-thick pot holder, which I worked in a kind of interesting way. I didn’t want to have to do any sewing on the project, so I started it from a crochet cast on and picked up stitches from the side of the cast on to make the hot pad all in one piece in the round with the edge sealed. 

This requires working on two circular needles, which is another technique I don’t use that often and am always reminded how much I like it when I do. 

The combination of double thickness and the stitch pattern makes for a hot pad that’s already pretty thick, but I also added a bit of old towel to the inside before I closed up the end to make it super thick and extra protective for your surfaces. 

I found the engineering challenge of this construction method to be a lot of fun, but you could also just knit it as a tube (casting on twice as many stitches as I did) and sew up the ends by hand when the knitting is done. Either way you’ve got a useful and pretty addition to your kitchen, whether you work it in a solid color, stripes or as a stash busting project will all your cotton odd balls. 

You can grab the pattern over at Our Daily Craft, or check it out on Ravelry. 

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