Great Open House! Thank you to all who attended. We covered alot in our meeting, so grab a cup of coffee, tea or even a glass of wine and enjoy.
Thank you for all your positive comments regarding the rearrangement of our yarn and fabric! In the yarn drawers we placed variegated and matching solids skeins in the same drawer. This hopefully will make yarn selection easier for those who use the knifty knitter loom. This will also help with the buying of yarn as we can make sure we have solids to go with the variegated. I admit it’s more fun to buy variegated but we need matching solids too.
We rearranged the fabric shelf by moving the girl fabric suitable for sizes through 10 to the far right on the shelves and the fabric suitable for sizes 12 and up to the far left. We moved the boys fabric in the middle to show separation. Our reason for doing this is we really need to improve our clothing selection for sizes 12 and up but we then also saw the need for us to buy more fabric suitable for sizes 12 and up. In our volunteer surveys, the most received comment was everything created was very nice however better fabric choices were needed in the larger sizes. They are correct. We do an awesome job with the smaller sizes and we all know we have struggled for years with the larger sizes. We all understand there is a big difference in trying to fit a second grader who is 7 and wears a size 14 and a fifth grader who is 10 and wears a size 14. With better fabric selection hopefully we can improve the clothing for sizes 12 and up. I also went thru the patterns and placed them with the fabric styles. This seemed to work with the boy patterns and knit patterns, so I thought let’s try it with the other patterns. Let’s face it, with our chair set up at Open House, it’s not easy to even get to the pattern drawers.
Please use caution when using ric-rac and lace. What is appropriate for size 6 is not appropriate for size 14.
I had said in my distribution recap email this summer, we need to concentrate on tops only for size 14 and up, therefore we would only be accepting tops for these sizes. We will have some dresses and skirts, but only selected patterns/fabrics. I created kits by selecting patterns and precut fabric lengths and put them in a plastic bag and placed them in a plastic tub on the fabric shelf. I created 11 kits in both knits and wovens and we had 5 left. I hope this will help us to improve. Please check this tub at our next Open House!
Every year after distribution we are flooded with donations of fabric and yarn. I will tell you 99.9% of the time these donations do not work for us. Please do not commit us to accepting donations. Our guidelines are the fabric needs to be a minimum of 1 yard (2 is preferred), 100% cotton in kids prints kindergarten to 6th grade, not stored in a garage or shed (heat breaks down the thread content and attracts bugs) and odor free (no cigarette, perfumes, pets, cooking odors, musty smells or laundry fragrances). If you feel the donation falls within these guidelines, then you can accept the fabric, launder it, and cut into 2 yard pieces. Fortunately we do not need to rely on fabric donations and we strive to buy fabric that is in style with purchased clothes as we do not want our kids to feel slighted when wearing our creations.
The yarn needs to have wrappers and be 100% acrylic, #4 yarn, and follow the guidelines noted above for fabric. Yarn easily absorbs odors and impossible to remove.
Thank you all for understanding the reasons for these guidelines.
After I sent out the chest measurements for boys shirts this summer, I was asked to do the same with girl sizes. Boy was that hard! So many styles equals so many measurements. I decided our biggest challenge was the waist. So after looking at the sizes on various patterns, I put together some guidelines using waist measurements only. Please keep in mind that this only works if there is a defined waist. If your garment does not have a defined waist then use the pattern size. We also felt our volunteers do not understand half-sizes. We decided to rename them to “special sizes” and created red size tags with waist measurements only. After creating your half size garment, measure the finished waist then circle the size/waist measurement on the red tag. It is very important to put all size tags on the left side under the armpit. We will also put these special sizes on the same clothing racks as the regular sizes. We can easily see the red tags and then will know when to restock these sizes. I will change the sizes in the volunteer name badges and during volunteer orientation, I will stress that these sizes are larger and how they will find the clothes on the racks, hopefully this will help the volunteers in fitting our kids. I am attaching the size guideline handout that I gave out at our meeting.
Thank you Kay Rapp for the beautiful military quilt she created for Vincent Payne! Vincent is the president of our BTSCD board and attends all our work days and every Open House. We truly appreciate him!
We will have our wallet class after our October meeting. It should be under an hour. I had two people sign up so please let me know if you want to attend so I can reserve a spot for you.
Two people signed up for the boy shirt class and requested a week day. I have not selected a day yet as I would like two more to attend the class and I am still open to also having a weekend class. Please let me know if you are interested in either so I can select some dates.
I am also attaching our latest event calendar thru January 2020. We are making a change with the sewing day at 35th Ave Sew and Vac. This will become a “no host” event. What this means is Gloria and I will not be attending on a regular basis so no inventory will be accepted. We feel that this event does not need us there on a regular basis and this will allow us to better balance our personal and charitable time. Please continue to attend this event to sew, cut out your items and play with yarn as Jackie wants us to still have our sew day.
Thank you all for reading this email! We covered alot at our meeting and I wanted you to be on the same page. If you want to receive emails regarding distribution only, please email me and I will change your email preferences.
Thank you all so much for all you do to make us successful!
Sandy