We hope this finds everyone healthy!  We hope you are ready for our last Open House of 2020.  We will have our Open House this month like we did in September.  We will be there from 9-12 and there will not be a meeting.  We will again have the yarn display in the general meeting area in order to social distance from the fabric and patterns.  Please make sure you have an inventory sheet with your turn in so the turn in line keeps moving.

In order to stay within the COVID guidelines, please wear a mask and maintain 6 feet from others.  Please keep in mind that some may be medically exempt from wearing a mask. We will do our best to limit those in our area and you may need to wait in your car.  We had tremendous success in September and no one needed to wait.

We had a donation of fabric that will be on tables undercover in the parking lot.  Please look through and take home whatever you would like.  This fabric is for personal use only.

As usual, there will not be a meeting in December.  Unfortunately we will not be able to have our annual appreciation luncheon in January so we will have an Open House instead.  More details and a reminder will be sent the first of January.

Even though we missed many Open Houses, you all did a terrific job turning in items for our kids.  Janette from BTSCD continued to work very hard to sign up kids from the schools and obtain ages and sometimes sizes so we could collect clothing and accessories to box up for the registered kids at each school.  She then scheduled the districts to pick up our items.  This resulted in 1,944 school kids still receiving items from Stitches of Love.  Janette also worked with AZ Helping Hands so we were able to donate clothes and accessories to 630 foster kids.  We also gave clothes and some accessories to about 100 kids with AZ Helping Hands for Single Moms.  We donated items to Central Arizona Shelter Services, Eve’s Place and Peoria School district.   We also gave some accessories to 225 Luke Air Force kids, 500 homeless kids at Sequoia Elementary school, 1,000 hats to the kids at Legacy in Bullhead City, and 250 hats to Prescott Boys and Girls Club. The end results of all your efforts was 2,774 kids received clothes and accessories and 2,275 kids received various accessories for a total of 5,049 kids received some kind of help from us.  Awesome job everyone!!!

Shh, this part is a secret, but after all the items were donated, we continued to go through our inventory and we did save some special items for next year!  It was very difficult to find all the super cute items while we were pulling items to donate so we decided to keep some real cute things that we knew the kids would have selected if they could have.  We ran out of all clothing in sizes 10-12 for the girls and dress shirts for the boys, same size.  Tops are still a very needed item so we tried to match up cute bottoms with plain t-shirts where we could.  We will be creating a special display of blouse fabrics with patterns in order to help us create more tops.  Some feedback we received from schools is to please have no items in the purses as this caused some issues.  We are also asking for no yarn purses be turned in for a few months starting in January.  We need for the fabric purses to catch up so we have a variety of purses for the girls to select from.  We also found quite a few brown hats. Please do not include them in our inventory or turn in brown hats.  We also ended up with a box of girls pillowcases.  Please remember that we do not make pillowcases for the girls. 

After many months of COVID social distancing and staying at home, Mary was able to meet with Go With the Flow and give them all the supplies we and Project Linus collected and the packs we created for them.  Demetra was very appreciative of all of the supplies and was able to create 60 period packs for AZ Helping Hands.  Plus they are sending more supplies to our local schools.  We also found a place for them to receive boxes so they will no longer need to buy them.  Many thanks to Jane Cox’s son Mike for helping them with boxes.  Mike also gave us all the boxes that we used to pack our items for the schools. 

Hopefully things will be better in 2021 and we can restart our sew days and normal Open Houses.  Thank you so much for hanging in there and continuing to make items for our kids.

Sandy