Julie Finn
Do you love to knit, crochet, or sew?
Do you love babies?
If so, you should be making something small and adorable to donate to Touching Little Lives!
Touching Little Lives is a non-profit that serves premature and newborn babies in Ohio who need warm clothes. Unfortunately, Ohio does not have a great record for premature births, babies born into poverty, or infant mortality. Lots of little babies are born in Ohio who need tiny accessories, or newborn layettes, or burial outfits. Volunteers handmake lovely little things for these babies, including afghans, quilts, blankets, hats, gowns, sleepers, booties, and sleep sacks. Touching Little Lives delivered over 37,000 of these items to families in 2016.
My younger daughter was born six weeks premature, and spent three weeks in the NICU, so I know first-hand how awful it is to stand in a baby store, post-partum, sleep-deprived, and full of grief and worry, and try to sort through a store full of clothes and toys made for big and healthy babies to find the couple of ugly outfits in preemie sizes.
Oh, and neither of the outfits that I found were acceptable, because neither of them accommodated all of the tubes and wires that are attached to a baby in the NICU.
You can save other parents from some of this worry and grief by making and donating nice things for their tiny babies. As I write this, for instance, Touching Little Lives is low on newborn hats (you can keep up-to-date on their current needs by following their facebook page), but they also offer guidelines for creating most popular baby items, such as sleepers and onesies, blankets, hats, bibs, stuffed animals, and booties. I really like sewing for babies, because baby clothes and accessories, especially, tend to use such a small amount of fabric and sew up so quickly. It’s likely that you have plenty of the materials required to make many of the items needed by Touching Little Lives right in your stash supplies!
Image Credit: Baby DIY photo via Shutterstock
