Marisa Gibler said anyone can knit an eight-by-eight square to help keep a child in South Africa warm.
“You could learn how to do that in one day and sit down and finish it in one day,” said Gibler, co-owner of the Yarn Underground. “But it also seemed like the kind of thing that unless somebody motivated someone to do it, they probably wouldn’t do it.”
Gibler and her business partner, Shelley Stone, are holding a competition between the University of Idaho and Washington State University to encourage students to knit or crochet black and gold or crimson and grey squares and drop them off at the store on Sixth Street by Oct. 10. The collected squares will be sent to the nonprofit organization Knit-a-Square.
The school that donates the most squares will receive a 10 percent discount at the store for the month of November, Gibler said.
Sandy McDonald of Melbourne, Australia, started Knit-a-Square in 2008.
“My aunt, who lives in Johannesburg came over to visit us,” McDonald said. “She told us about the issue of HIV/AIDS orphans, which we didn’t really know very much about, and were very shocked to hear that she regularly drove around traffic and around the streets of Johannesburg, and gave out blankets at traffic lights to children that were alone and cold during winter.”
McDonald said she started looking online for solutions, and came up with the idea of asking the world’s knitters to send squares to South Africa that her aunt could then crochet into blankets.
“We started doing research about the orphaned and vulnerable children situation in South Africa, and we were truly shocked by the statistics,” McDonald said. “We had no idea the extent to which these children were being devastated by the twin perils of HIV/AIDS and poverty.”
In 2009, Lion Brand Yarn featured Knit-a-Square as its charity of the month.
“We had 50,000 hits on the website in one day, and it just took off from there,” McDonald said. “We didn’t understand how large the project would be. When the schools started to take it up, because it was a natural project to introduce into schools because teaching the kids to knit was a great thing to do, but also, being able to knit just a square and send it off to South Africa was a really meaningful thing for a child to do.”
McDonald said about 260,000 squares and 40,000 other knitted items have arrived in Johannesburg, turning her aunt’s house into a warehouse.
The squares are taken to local prisons where inmates learning to become tailors make them into blankets. Then the blankets are distributed to daycare centers within shantytowns and to parishes.
The blankets are also distributed in Durban, South Africa and sent to Zimbabwe.
“It gets cold enough (below zero) that if you don’t have a blanket, you are very miserable,” McDonald said. “And of course, many of these children are infected by HIV/AIDS themselves, and so it’s really imperative they be kept warm, because their immune systems are so compromised.”
Gibler said she discovered Knit-a-Square when someone posted a link to the website on the Yarn Underground’s Facebook page.
“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s an easy thing to do,'” Gibler said.
To encourage people to participate, the Yarn Underground will hold a free knitting class Oct. 9.
“You don’t necessarily have to use yarn from our store. Basically, we just want to have a big box full to send,” Gibler said.