Following on from Badgerween, the hard working Badger Sett are busy making creations for our next celebration: Badgermas!
You can read all about the Badger Sett here.
We are fundraising for the Badger Trust’s badger vaccination project through crafty loveliness, and we’ve raised over £300 so far.
This week I’m launching a new fundraising initiative with a collective of other creatives to help fundraise for badgers.
The UK’s badger’s have had such a spectacularly awful time at our hands, I am sometimes amazed that we have any left. These black and white stripy mustelids have a long history of persecution, and were finally granted legal protection from killing and injury to stop things like badger baiting and fighting.
When I lived in Cornwall in the early 2000s, the government started a scientific trial badger cull in the South West, to see if it would stop the spread of bovine tuberculosis among cows. It was a heartbreaking time and so strange to think that these protected animals were now being legally killed. However, the results came back that this was not an effective way to stop the spread of bTb and help cattle farmers protect their herds.
But. The government then rolled the badger cull out to other areas anyway, and they keep rolling it out further and further, with very little science to prove that killing badgers does anything to impact bTb.
After a flurry of petitions and donations when the big culls started, I had to tune out of badger news because it was just too depressing.
Last week though, I got an email newsletter from the Badger Trust. Among all their amazing work (what do you do when your own government wants to destroy the animal you were set up to protect?!) they are running a badger vaccination project and it sounds really promising, for all sorts of reasons. One reason is that it costs £1,000 to cull a badger but £200 to vaccinate one. You can read all about this hopeful project on the Badger Trust website here.
So I did a bit of a call out on social media…
And the Badger Sett was born 🙂
We are a group of creative people raising funds and awareness for the badger vaccination programme. We are going to be celebrating Badgerween and Badgermas by making all sorts of lovely things and donation a percentage of all our sales to the Badger Trust. You can read more about it here, and sign up if you would like to join in too!
I used to work for a charity, and so am really aware that fundraising can be really, really hard. It takes a lot to get people on board with a cause, and we are so often asked to give that we can just get fed up and burnt out.
So it’s been fascinating to have been involved with two big charity projects this year that have done some really magical things.
The #titsoutcollective ran throughout July, with creatives all over the world making and buying things inspired by the amazing Countess Ablaze. She started it (accidentally) with a knitting yarn that the she created in response to an approach from a business to get lots of things for free in return for ‘exposure.’ She raised £3,000 for charity the sale of. that. Then in July, she rallied 287 people to make were making things and donating a portion of their profits to their favourite charities. You can find out more about it all at the Countess Ablaze website here.
By the end of the month, a staggering £55,219 had been raised for those charities, including a whopping £8,000+ just for Mind through a raffle! It was all a bit overwhelming to be honest. The community buy-in and the way everyone was able to so quickly pull something together was inspiring. And the Countess herself, with her huge community of Instagram followers, fans and her general all-round kick-ass presence meant that something huge came together almost instantly. You can read about my contribution to the project here.
Meanwhile, the Flower Power Fund, a year-long project which was started by knitter Sarah Holmes in January with a goal of £1,000, has been smashing its target over and over again. Also based in the knitting and crafts community, every month there are new goodies for sale that donate a portion of their proceeds to Marie Curie. The engagement and supportive vibes that are involved in this project are so lovely, and I’ve made so many new friends. It’s awesome!
By the end of June we’d raised £9,121.63 😀
I keep thinking about both of these projects with my charity hat on and pondering exactly what it is that makes them so successful, and in a way it’s something that charities themselves would struggle to replicate because it starts at the community level. Although Sarah works for Marie Curie, its not on the fundraising side and she’s managed to connect with a ready made big and quickly growing audience of enthusiastic and bought-in people.
I am absolutely LOVING working this way, and would love to here from you if you would like any help from me for your charity or fundraising projects, do say hello :
It’s been an exciting day – I’ve designed some cherry wood pins and pendants which have arrived and I’ve been busy sticking them together and taking lots of photos!
We started with a drawing of a pair of Great Tits, and with lots of help from my partner Josh and Steve at Clear Cut Creation, I developed a design that Steve laser etched onto 35mm disks of cherry wood.
The pins and pendants are part of the #titsoutcollective, a brilliant fundraising initiative by Countess Ablaze that you can find out more about here.
I’m fundraising for Together Rising, an inspiring charity responding very fast to humanitarian issues around the world. £2 per pin and 20% of each print sale goes to them. You can discover more about their work here.
And you can find all of these goodies in the Sam Draws Things online shop here.
It’s been a real delight to design my first enamel pin in honour of the Flower Power Fund. I translated the branding I created for them into a simplified version using Adobe Illustrator, learning along the way how to translate my scribblly, wobbly style into something that would work on a pin… I am absolutely thrilled with how they came out, they are so shiny and lovely!
They’re available for pre-order now for £7 each, and £2 from every pin sale will be donated to Marie Curie (registered charity number 207994 England & Wales, SC038731 in Scotland).
You can find them in my Etsy Shop here, and my online shop here 🙂
I’m really excited to launch the first in a range of 12 new botanical prints.
An elegant Snowdrop – Galanthus nivalis. The first flowers to appear after winter in the UK, I love to see them break through the ground and remind us all that spring is coming. Their delicate heads are like little fairy skirts, and their simple white and green hues are so elegant.
The Snowdrop is carefully drawn in pen and ink. I’ve added the the shades of green and and text digitally to create a limited edition signed A5 giclee print on lovely archival paper.
This is the first in a series of 12 artworks for the Flower Power Fund, fundraising for Marie Curie. 40% of the sale price of each print will be donated to Marie Curie (registered charity number 207994 England & Wales, SC038731 in Scotland).
The prints are to tie in with the 12 beautiful hand-dyed knitting yarns that are also being released for the Fund, one a month over the course of 2018. Each yarn is inspired by a different flower and I am going to draw each of them to create more lovely prints. You can find out more about the Flower Power Fund on Facebook here and Instagram here.
You can find the gorgeous Snowdrop yarn by Norah George Yarns here.
You can find the Snowdrop print in my online shop here.
An exciting new project launched on Wednesday at 8pm – raising funds for Marie Curie, 12 independent yarn dyers are creating 12 beautiful knitting yarns inspired by different flowers. A new yarn will be launched every month in 2018.
Hand-dyed yarn is the designer end of knitting – the beautiful coloured skeins are generally created in small batches that often sell out reeeeeally fast. I’ve had a little glimpse into this wonderful woolly world through created the branding for the gorgeous Hedgerow Yarns. Jane’s scrummy creations sell out in minutes!
And following on from that bit of loveliness, I was commissioned by the wonderful Sarah Holmes to create the logo and branding for The Flower Power Fund. You can find them on Instagram here and Sarah’s Just Giving page with more info is here. Sarah is doing all sorts of awesome things to raise funds this year, and it’s not the first time. Last year she ran a campaign that meant that everyone in a Marie Curie hospice got a beautiful pair of hand-kintted socks for Christmas, and sold a sock knitting pattern to raise almost £600.
The Flower Power Fund first yarn was Snowdrop by Norah George and it’s so pretty! There is a limited batch ready to ship, and luckily this time they are also going to be made to order when that sells out. They were snapped up really quickly on Wednesday after they launched 🙂
You can buy Snowdrop online here.
And if you NEED to know when all those lovely yarns are being launched and set your Yarn Alarm, you can sign up to join the mailing list and keep up with the news here.
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