Hey there, Poor Impulsives. About a million things happened in the course of the pandemic. Remember when it was so dangerous we stopped opening our mail? Yeah, that was a blast. Until that point, the Cat Blanket Project, started by the Lovely Georg, served the purpose of providing The Owl House, a small cat rescue, with cat blankets. Georg asked me to make blankets. I was a terrible knitter. Cats don’t care! I asked you, Poor Impulsives, for your spare yarn, and you gave it to me. People sent yarn from all over the place. I knitted it into peculiar swatches and sent it to the Owl House. I wrote you annual reports of how I used what you sent me. Sometimes there were special projects like baby blankets for hospitals or scarves for endangered youths. This went on for eeeeeons. Many cats got many blankets, babies got blankets, youths got scarves. Then came COVID. We all adapted in our own quirky ways.

In the meantime, other things changed. Stitchers around me died. I collected their stashes and tools. This was a big change. Stitchers have longterm plans and death is extremely inconvenient! Another big change: I learned how to crochet and developed my own blanket pattern. A blanket, I decided, didn’t have to be rectangular. It could be reasonably round. Ish. I’m not saying I’m brilliant at this crochet thing. Another thing that changed: since I couldn’t mail a couple dozen cat blankets, I started delivering them to shelters near me.

I mean, who the hell knew what was going to happen, but cats were still in shelters. People adopted cats and emptied shelters, but when they went back to work, some assholes returned them. Fuck those jerks. One day, I was standing in a local shelter with a bag of blankets when someone brought in a cat in a carrier and just left it there, and I was breathless, thinking about how freaked out that cat must be.

Along the way, I stopped providing annual reports because I couldn’t keep count anymore and wasn’t exactly sure what year it was. Writing checks was hell. When I produced enough blankets that the craft room was uncomfortably full, I bagged up blankets and drove to a shelter. A year ago, my oldest friend Trout died, and her yarn arrived at my house in waves as her partner sorted through her possessions. My dear friend Lala took a lot of yarn for other projects, and we gave away a lot to local stitchers, and there was still so much yarn because stitchers have plans, and death is inconvenient.

So here is the thing: nothing is stopping you from doing this sort of thing, too. You see. You know. Someone dies and leaves a lot of something, and maybe you can do something with it. Maybe you can move it to where it becomes an art supply, not landfill. Trout loved ink pads and stamps. I walked dozens and dozens of stamps and inks to a nursery school, where they were received with glee.

If you knit or crochet, an animal shelter near you will probably welcome scrap yarn blankets. Call them. Ask. It’s so easy. I’m going to check in on the Owl House to see if they need blankets, because I’m not quite but almost up to my neck in blankets.