Knitting for UK charities

Knimble Knitters is a competition where you could win £200 by putting your knitting skills to the test in aid of Arthritis Care.

Knit a scarf, hat, pair of mittens or any other accessory - as long as it falls under the chosen category of Winter. Just pay an entry fee of £2 per item and send in four good quality photos of each item before 15 February 2010. There is no limit to the number of items you can enter. Winners will be announced in March.

First prize: £200
Second prize: £50
Third prize: £25

Operation Christmas Child needs knitters to make mittens, a scarf or a beanie hat or even a hand puppet to put a smile on a chid's face.

You can use their specially made pattern for hand puppets. The clowns were so popular last winter that they hope to have many more knitted puppets in shoe boxes this year. Playing with a glove puppet has been found to be very therapeutic for a child suffering from trauma or isolation - the puppet becomes a little friend to talk to.

You can find out the location of your nearest (UK) drop-off point by checking the OCC website from 2nd October 2009. For individuals and groups (up to 50 boxes): You can take your shoe boxes to any of the Drop Off points between the 1st and 18th of November 2009.

Sands is the UK neonatal and infant death charity. Sands need knitted baby blankets for their Precious Memory Boxes. A pattern is available on their website. They also require donations of white DK yarn.

Knit A Square asks you to make and send 8 x 8" squares to help keep an AIDS orphan warm. Soweto Comfort Club, who have taken up this knitting project with great enthusiasm, will join and distribute the blankets.

The Knit A Square website has full instructions on how to knit or crochet squares, and how to send them to South Africa where they will be distributed to the needy.

Hospitals and community midwifes use model breasts to show new mothers how to breastfeed and how to express milk if necessary, but they cost £35 each, and knitted versions work just as well!

Contact your local hospital's infant feeding co-ordinator to find out if they would welcome donations, then use this knitting pattern, from the Lactation Consultants of Great Britain (pdf) to knit breasts in any skin shade.

Every year around September, Innocent Smoothies launch 'The Big Knit', asking knitters to knit tiny bobble hats for their smoothie bottles. A basic pattern, which you can customise, is available from the Big Knit website. The 2009 campaign closed on Friday 16 October 2009.

Each behatted bottle sold in Sainsburys from 4th November 2009 raises 35p for Age Concern and Help The Aged, to fund projects and advice centres offering information on healthy eating as well as cooking clubs and get-togethers where older people can sit down and enjoy a meal in each other's company. Hot Christmas dinners all round.

You can read about how money raised in 2008 reached older people in Devon here.

Alex Gore Browne has been hailed as one of the UK's hottest young fashion designers. Kate Moss, Jade Jagger and Jemima Khan are among the celebrity fans of her hand-made, elegant, feminine collections that have transformed the image of knitwear.

Download her exclusive scarf pattern (pdf) and make a donation to The Children's Society's 'The Big Stitch' campaign. Maybe you could donate every time you make one?

Knit a bear for a child who needs comfort or something to love. Contact Teddies for Tragedies and they will tell you where your bear is needed. Each bear is knitted to the same basic pattern so that no bear is 'better' than any other - as the website says:

"Don't deviate from the pattern, all teddies are different but none should be superior (no skirts or hats, stripes are OK in moderation, especially if you're using up duller colours). Think of it this way - we all want our teddy to be the best but do we want the child who doesn't get our teddy to be disappointed?"

You'll also need to run up a simple drawing bag for the bear to live in - again, follow the instructions on the Teddies for Tragedies website.

From March - October 2008, Save The Children ran the 'Knit One, Save One' campaign to urge the Prime Minister Gordon Brown to do all in his power to help save the 9.2 million children worldwide who still die each year before the age of 5. Knitters were asked to send in baby hats, which would be sent to places where newborns needed them, and a letter to Gordon Brown.

You can look through an online book of letters and photos from the 2008 campaign. Watch this space for more from Save The Children.

During 2008, Oxfam supporters knitted thousands of squares which were assembled as a giant baby blanket - a 'visual petition' handed in to world leaders in September 2008. Each of the 250,000 patches represented one mum who should have survived pregnancy in the last six months.

You can take a look at the handiwork in the Oxfam's Maternal Mortality Campaign group on Flickr. Watch this space for more from Oxfam's knitters.