The Replanting Australia project

is another victim of Covid19. Right now it is struggling to survive - but I hope it will if we can give it a bit of "intensive" care.

For those of you who don't know about it this is a project which started as a response to the bush/wild fires on Kangaroo Island in the summer of 2019-2020. (Kangaroo Island is the island at the bottom of this state - near the part which looks a bit like Italy.)  

The fires burnt out over a quarter of the area which is home to an incredibly valuable Ligurian bee population. They are very, very important because the world's bee population could depend on the survival and expansion in number of these bees. 

Those of us who normally work in Handicrafts at the state's annual Show  thought the Show could be used as a venue to raise interest in the problem of rehabilitating the landscape to help the bee population. I went ahead and designed knitted blanket squares - hopefully not your average boring garter stitch blanket square. There are camels as well as koalas, the Indian Pacific railway, the Royal Flying Doctor Service, surf, desert, the wine industry and more. A good friend designed a square which is an outline of the island. Some patterns for the squares went up on the Showground website, those and others went up on a Facebook page called "Replanting Australia".  All this took several hundred hours of my time and other people have put in a few hours as well.

We set up a competition for this year's Show asking people to design their own squares. We hoped to get at least enough to make several good size blankets that could be raffled off in a lottery at the Show.

The Show has been cancelled. We need to find another way of doing this. If you are reading this and you did knit a square we would still like to have it. Next week we are going to see if we can still get enough squares, put them together and raffle them off for funds for the Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park's rehabilitation work. I am also going to see if there is a way of publishing the patterns to raise funds because they can't stay on the Show website forever.

But, we are going to need some help. We are going to need those squares....please!