Treasury for Haiti

I managed to get my timing right this morning, for a change, & grabbed another treasury on Etsy.

The more I look, the more impressed I become at the artists that are still willing to give.

If you have an Etsy account & a few moment to spare to click & comment it would be hugely appreciated.

Keeping Haiti in our Hearts

In the course of putting together this treasury I discovered a new blog, which I will post about tomorrow.





New Hearts went up over the weekend, all of them sold overnight. I will update everything tomorrow evening. For now it seems that I am playing a permanent game of catch up..... & enjoying every moment of it :o)

Heart #11

Heart #12

Heart #13

Have a Heart for Haiti - "The Plan"

Monday I spent checking out all of the charity organizations that will be active in Haiti. Not as easy as you may think. I wanted a Christian based charity, one that was global, one that had an established presence in Haiti &, of course, one that you could specifically tag donations to go to Haiti.

I chose World Vision as it was important to me to have an agency that already has a team in Haiti ready to act now. That is what the people there need, immediate help & support.
World Vision has had a presence in the region for 30 years & already have 800 staff there, 18.1 metric tonnes of supplies due, hopefully landed by now and more of their global emergency relief team are on the way.

My plan is to list at least one heart per day. Ultimately I would like to make (& hopefully sell) two hearts per day until at least the end of the first week in February.
100% (after the Etsy/Paypal fees) of the profit will go to World Vision. I'll make the donation to World Vision once a week. Postage will be the cost of the shipping with no charge for packaging etc.
I've tried to calculate the price of the beads so that World Vision will end up getting a minimum of US$15.00, after the fees, per bead sold.

I will show a running total of the beads sold, amount raised & donated so far in my Etsy Shop Announcement, my Website & here on my Blog.

Without further ado - Bead #2

Have a Heart For Haiti - "The Idea"

As Kiwi's, it is so very easy to distance ourselves from the Natural Disasters that happen around the world.
Down here in the down under of Down Under, it's as simple as not watching the evening news, or bypassing your homepage on a daily basis should it be one that shows news headlines. I will freely admit that I'm guilty of that, telling myself that there is so much negativity & that I'll start watching again when the news starts reports at least some positive content, instead of all doom & gloom.

But there comes a time when you can't ignore it. In recent years there have been a few too many of those times.... natural disasters of monumental proportions happening right after Christmas. When you have been sitting here bemoaning the lack of any real summer, or feeling sorry for yourself because you dont have a car to drive any more, or that the neighbours have absolutely no consideration for others because they think it's OK to have their sub woofer thudding it's irritating beat into your home all hours of the day & night, something such as the absolute devastation that the Haitian Earthquake has caused, can make you take a step back & look at what really is important.
I have to say it really puts things into perspective.

Quiet frankly times are tough....everywhere. When times are hard it becomes all to convenient to take the easy way out by saying to yourself "but what difference will the little I can afford to give, make". The voice in your head whispers back "but if everyone thought that way, all those little amounts would never get to be a big amount that CAN make a difference".

In short, a couple of days ago I was thinking of a response to an email I'd received from a friend, & I had an idea. I suspect that it had been quietly brewing for a while, but the school holidays have dulled my senses somewhat ;o)

I'd recently been looking at lampwork hearts on one of the glass forums, which offered a spectacular display with everyone getting into gear for Valentines Day.
I enjoy looking at all of the beautiful glass hearts & all of the different ways that the many talented lampworkers create them, but I have never really been called to make them. I'd even visited the "One World, One Heart" project trying to find the incentive & had thought about joining that & perhaps trying to make a couple of hearts to give away here on my blog, but decided that I wasn't really that fussed on making them at all. I'm not sure why, perhaps it is just because I didn't have a good enough reason ...until now.

Then on Saturday night it hit me, I could make hearts to sell in my Etsy store & donate all of the proceeds to a Charity organization that was active in providing emergency relief in Haiti.
Sunday's torch session was spent trying to figure out how to make presentable hearts & I managed three that will see the light of day!

Here is Heart #1 - no names for these listings, just numbers so that it makes it easy for everyone to keep track. It will be up on Etsy shortly, but watch for the next blog post for more information.