Sea and Wood: Sponsor me to look a fool for ICAN!

Bear with me, this post is craft-related, promise :D

You may have gathered from previous entries that I run Sing and Sign baby signing classes here in Lancashire. I've been doing it about three years now and I love it to pieces; it's such a worthwhile job to help babies and toddlers learn to communicate and feel confident that they can express their needs, sign and then talk about what's going on in their world and help them get a good start for the future. It makes such a huge impact on their lives - and their parents' lives too, I don't know what we'd have done without signing. I can still see the benefits of having signed with K each and every day and I'm so glad I decided to completely change direction to teach it!

Sing & Sign support the childrens' communications charity ICAN nationally and we raise money every year via the Chatterbox Challenge event. We're having a special event this year - all our teachers (from Orkney to Scilly, how cool is that!) are running specially-themed sessions for our classes at the end of term, which for us here in Lancashire is 18th-22nd July. All the babies are going to be sponsored to dress up to raise money; it's going to be so much fun!

K is, naturally, a confident and expressive communicator at the grand old age of 3.5yo :D and when I told her about the event, her first questions were "Can I come dressed up too?" and "What are you going to dress up as, Mummy?". Oh dear. What have I got myself into?! She's right - I really should dress up too! So I have decided on a cat costume because I can still wear my uniform t-shirt over the top (the babies really give me funny looks if they ever see me in civvies!) and have my hands fairly free to sign with.

I have ears and a tail, am going to paint on some whiskers and I've crocheted myself a pair of fluffy fingerless gloves to be paws, I just need some black leggings and I'm ready to roll. So please please please sponsor me to teach all three of my classes (18th/22nd Jul) dressed up - and K's coming along to one session as a rabbit, too, complete with pompom tail wot I have made :D ICAN is a really worthwhile charity so if you can spare a couple of quid I'd be very grateful. Speech & language problems are becoming more and more widespread and thousands and thousands of children are not reaching their full potential in school or socially because of communication issues; ICAN supports all kids right from early years into secondary school with some really great programmes.

I have also pledged to replace my Facebook profile pic for a month with one of me dressed up if I can get to £100 - so come on, you know you want to make me look like a fool ;)

For crafters (see, I told you I'd get to the point eventually)! Would you like the pattern I've created for the mitten-paws? Simply donate £2 or more via the link below, comment on this entry and drop me an email to "icanpattern [at] carolinewood.co.uk" (replace [at] with @, of course) with the details of your donation, and I'll send you a PDF. :D I'm hoping to make this available via Etsy in future as well.