Over £10,000 raised for Marie Curie Cancer Care

Well, another amazing Happy Friday moment happened to me this week. In the early minutes of Friday morning, entry to the charity draw to win the Spring Flower Blanket had ended and I was able to add up the total raised for Marie Curie Cancer Care – a massive £10814.95. Wow!

The total was made up from the amount donated, which was just under £9700.00 plus the amount of gift aid left over after Just Giving take their admin fee (5% of the donation total). This money will mean so much to Marie Curie Cancer Care, which provides nurses to care for people who are terminally ill, enabling them to stay in their homes with their family close by.

Earlier in the week I had arranged for a little visit from two Marie Curie nurses and the local fundraiser for the charity, so that they could see the blanket for themselves and hear about how it was raising so much money.

The final day before entries closed was exciting – we passed the original total of £5000 last weekend and many people kept sharing and posting on Facebook and Instagram to generate as many donations as possible. The national Marie Curie Facebook page, which has 500,000 followers, also shared and donations poured in.

I thought we were going to make close to £9000 but when we exceeded that, it was touch and go whether the donations would go over £10K. They didn’t quite, but when the gift aid was taken into account, the grand total that will go direct to Marie Curie was well over that.

I got to bed at 2am on Friday morning and was then up again at 8 to start the less than happy task of collating all the entries, checking and cross checking and converting all the donations in non-UK currency to the equivalent in GBP. That took most of the day, then once I had the final list, which gave one ticket per £2 donated, I generated the random list of numbers between 1 and over 4800 and allocated all the ticket numbers.

This made sure that every £2 donation had the same chance of buying the winning ticket. I saved the list as a pdf file and emailed it to Heather of The Patchwork Heart and to Lucy of Attic24. Although  both had supported the draw magnificently, neither had entered (Lucy donated just before I won the flower blanket on my other Just Giving page for Marie Curie and Heather donated all her time organising the making of the blanket and creating it from our squares).

They acted as independent observers that I was doing things correctly and I’ve explained how the winner was chosen in detail so that everyone can read my method.

I had a bit of a relax on Friday evening with some easy crochet and some TV with my feet up. Then, at 1.30pm on Saturday 25 April, I used a random number generator to pick the winning ticket. I filmed this using my iphone, which wasn’t easy!!. Although I’d practiced filming a draw between 1 and 10 in the previous week, I didn’t anticipate how much my hands would be shaking! The final video is therefore a bit wobbly but I managed it. This is a still picture to show the number – 4343.

The next few minutes were a bit stressful as I had planned to post to Facebook and Instagram independently, but my computer wouldn’t behave. Fortunately I was able to load the video into Instagram and post from there onto IG and onto Facebook. I’d also emailed Lucy and Heather to tell them the winning number so they could cross-check the name of the winner.

And at 2pm they had both confirmed, so I was able to post the video and let everyone know that the Spring Flower Blanket had been won by Fiona Townsend.

At that stage I hadn’t had a reply to the email I’d sent to Fiona – lots of people posted congratulations to her but my email stayed silent.

Several hours later I got a very excited reply that she had just checked her emails and was stunned to have won! It turns out that she isn’t even on Facebook or Instagram and uses her boyfriend’s Facebook account to occasionally check the FB page of Attic24 – and that is where she say the flower blanket draw. She donated in the first few days, at the end of March and hadn’t given it much thought since. She is very, very happy to have won and the Spring Flower Blanket will be on its way to its forever home near Bristol in South Gloucestershire next week.

Phew – a bit of me time now!

I have really enjoyed running the fundraising for this project but I honestly did not expect the grand total being over £10,000. It is truly amazing. Nor did I really anticipate how much work and time it would take and I seem to have done nothing else but talk about the blanket for weeks. When I look back, the fundraising was only over four weeks but in my mind it was at least a couple of months.

My one last task is to post the blanket off next week and to have a bit of me-time, enjoying my crochet and crafting and this fine spring weather. My seascape ripple blanket is coming along and I want to have a bit of time to progress that. One evening this week was so warm, I did managed to have an hour rippling in the garden until it was almost dark!

The last row I worked here is in storm blue, one of the new Stylecraft DK colours that has just come out – and I love it. I also bought Parma violet and Sage green and they are both lovely colours too.

In my order from the lovely Woolwwarehouse I also opted to buy the new shade card and discovered that Stylecraft have also added some variegated shades, which look delish!

Flower square tutorials planned

I’m also planning some blog posts about making flower squares. It isn’t going to be possible to produce a pattern for this blanket – the individual squares were made by 120 people months ago and most can’t really remember which pattern they used or how they made their square up.

But many people have asked for a pattern – so I’m going to put together some tutorials and links to give anyone who wants to try to make a flower blanket a reasonable starting point.

And who knows, we might raise a few more pounds…

Check out the other blogs on Penny’s link up for more happy moments xxx