Coming out of hiding, and helping out with a little knit-ivity

There’s been a little (kindly) bleating lately in response to my blog neglect. I won’t name names – ewe know who ewe are .

So I’ve crawled out from beneath the enormous pile of paperwork that has kept me occupied of late to tell you what I’ve been up to creatively.

{“So, what’s with the sheep?”}

There’s much to do as I prepare to downsize, and while I have a tendency to whine about the size of the challenge it has indeed been helpful to have a task to focus on. I love spending time with my friends and my beautiful family too.

But every now and then, like when I look into my supermarket trolley of purchases for a household of one, I find myself again quite overcome by a deep sadness and despair. 

One of the very best antidotes to feeling sorry for myself has been helping others, if only in a small way. We all need to be needed, don’t we?

{“So, what’s with the sheep?”}

A few weeks ago our friend Jane, from the neighbouring parish of St John’s Darlinghurst, phoned to ask if Team Di (Di B and myself) could help her out.

She was organising a Messy Christmas community outreach for St John’s, and urgently needed knitters to make enough sheep to be placed in shops and businesses in the streets around the church for ten days leading up to  Christmas.

Here’s how their church described the Messy Church Christmas Trail…

The Messy Church Christmas Trail
As you know we are starting our Messy Church
Service next year. To introduce this to the community
we are going to have a Messy Christmas Service
on Christmas Eve and to encourage people
along to that we are going to have a Messy Christmas
Sheep Trail. The idea is that we knit sheep,
(that's right knit!) and offer them to businesses that
we have contact with on Victoria Street. They are allowed to name them and
we then have forms and local families can go to each business and find the
sheep and its name and fill it out. There will be prizes and each form will have
the Christmas story and details of our services on it.

No problem, we said, and with a little help from Di’s mother Margaret and our friend Helen in no time we had seven fat sheep!

They didn’t have to be perfect (thanks, Jane), in fact “quirky” was the word she used. We happen to specialise in “quirky”, and I think our seven sheep certainly are individuals!

 

At the end of the time the sheep are to be rounded up and taken back to St John’s for a children’s Christmas celebration!

They might have quite a few tales to tell by then.

I have lots to share with you here in the next week, but now it’s time I dived back into that paperwork. Bottoms up!

Di