CraftHope

Faced nightly with the sadness in Anderson Coopers eyes while he catamarans the Gulf, I've been scouring the internet for ways to help. I was weary of giving money to the organizations springing up all over the south, and feel very fortunate to have come across a facebook post about crafthope.com.

There is a woman in Florida accepting seamless t-shirts and Dawn soap which are used to clean marine life affected by the oil spill. Evidently the original Dawn formula has been used for this purpose for decades, and now Dawn is donating a dollar to the Marine Mammal Center for every bottle purchased.

We began cleaning out our closets and gathered last Tuesday to drink wine, chat, and develop massive blisters from cutting the shit out of some t-shirts. (I'll provide a tutorial if anyone is interested, but I'm sorry for ya if you cant figure out how to cut off hems and seams and fold the two t-shirt rags you will be left with.)

We finished around 170, and once the booze wore off the next day, it occurred to me to roll each shirt, put them in bundles of ten and secure them with the hems we had cut. This little repurposing stint earned me three gold stars in my internal battle to disassociate from my wasteful upbringing. For the record, "recycling" is something liberals do for attention, and it's important to remember that 4wheelers, trucks and motorcycles are the right, right-winged way to get around in style. It's always exciting when I have my little reformed-agendad breakthroughs. (Although if you see him, please tell my father I voted for McCain.)

The group reconvened last night to cut EVEN MORE shirts. One of our little deconstructionist seamstresses got ClearChannel to donate shirts, and shipping costs. They also let us borrow a van, because that was the only reasonable way to transport all the shirts we ended up with. It took five hours, fourteen hands and six pairs of scissors, but we made it through almost all of them. Blunt scissors tossed to the side, our beleaguered hands began rolling, tying and stacking our little dolphin-cleaning rags.

In a situation that seems so helpless, it felt great to find a way to give our time and effort. Though BP can't launch our jersey bundles into the pipe to stop the oil, our rags will be used with the Dawn soap by Gulf coast volunteers to help clean the marine life affected by this catastrophe. It's not much, but it's something.

For more information on this project, visit www.crafthope.com. So far they have 800 shirts collected, and I'm really proud to say that our donation will add close to 600 more.