I have a serious love affair with the Internet — and things like Twitter. And furthermore, I love bloggers who become friends — and share their inspiration with the rest of us! I was innocently tweeting away the other day, as I often do, about the crochet projects I’m working on — for customers on Etsy and to appease my own creative energy. The lovely and talented Lexi of Tea and Crumpets responded to one of my tweets about crochet by asking: “Have you heard about the Red Scarf Project?”

“The wha?” was my initial reaction, but it didn’t take long for me to get myself over to Google and investigate. The Red Scarf Project is a “unique initiative to warm the hearts (and necks) of college-found foster youth.” A charity drive by the Orphan Foundation of America, the Red Scarf Project is rather simple: knitters and crocheters are asked to simply make and send red scarves to the foundation, which distributes them via care packages to their students in college as reminders of those who are cheering them on and thinking of them as they study, work and live. Even if we’ve never met them.

Sounds awesome, right? And as someone who has a hard time even watching TV in the evenings without a hook and chunk of yarn in my lap, this sounded like the perfect project for me. I like charity! I like helping! I like making scarves!

Only problem? The deadline for this year had passed. The scarves collected through Dec. 15, 2009 will now be distributed to the college students on Feb. 14. With a sigh of dismay, I closed out the 10 million browser windows open on my computer (seriously, multi-tasking is in the blood) and slunk away to find a Diet Coke and drown my misery in caffeinated, fizzy and noncaloric goodness.

Enter Lexi — and Craft Hope, a crafting website and community dedicated to helping others through crafts! Their sixth project is for — you guessed it! — the Red Scarf Project, and Craft Hope got special permission to extend the deadline for submitting red scarves to the initiative! YES!

You’d have thought someone handed me a multi-book publishing deal, I was so excited. And I made my first scarf this past weekend, with plans to make at least one more before the new Feb. 14 deadline. The group asks that the scarves be unisex — or as close to unisex as possible — and I can’t really see any gentlemen rocking the little number I have on at left! Therefore, I’m making another red scarf — wider, a little darker in color. Hopefully a young man won’t feel too awkward sporting it. Or, at the very least, he’ll make it his own!

In all seriousness, I think this is such an awesome project — and I’m so glad to have discovered it from Lexi! I really, really love to crochet and had no idea there was such a world of charitable crafting. Being all Internet- and blog-obsessed, I suppose I should have figured that out sooner, but I’m really happy to have learned about it now!

If you’d like to get involved, please do — Craft Hope has all of the information on the project. You can also see more about the Orphan Foundation of America or learn about the ways Craft Hope is now helping Haiti through crafts.

Crafters are such a devoted, generous crew, and I really feel like nothing beats handmade. At the risk of sounding cheesy (but it’s never stopped me before), there’s a little bit of love in every stitch. Aww.