Stitch Red and Jimmy Beans Wool

I love Jimmy Beans Wool. If you're a knitter, you should too. It is truly, honestly my absolute favorite knitting store, ever. I could go on and on about their insanely amazing customer service, or their Willy Wonkian-selection of yarns, or their incredibly interactive, user-friendly, highly navigable website, but I won't. You'd never get to the end of this blog post if I did.
Suffice it to say, I've never actually set foot in their store. I've worked in an actual yarn store, and their store is still my favorite store in the entire world. I dream about one day going to Reno just so I can visit and meet all the people I feel like I know already (I don't need Vegas if I got yarn!).
So I am all too happy to dedicate this post to an amazing cause that Laura Zander, owner of JBW, started to fight heart disease.

It's called Stitch Red and it aims to "inform women of the dangers of heart disease, encourage them to lower their risk factors and help them stay heart healthy." Heart disease is the number one killer of women in the United States.

The project is joined by many great names in the knitting industry: Interweave Knits (another personal favorite), which is generously donating 5% of the profits from these patterns to The Heart Truth,  a National Awareness Campaign for Women About Heart Disease; Berroco, which has designated a shade of red in their yarns as a Stitch Red product; Namaste, which has designated a nifty red accessories pouch for the cause; Artyarns, which has turned one of their most beautiful shades of crimson into a Stitch Red color; and there are many more—too many for me to list, really. Jimmy Beans has gathered up over a dozen partners. You can find them here, with their Stitch Red contributions here. All partners will be donating 5% of the profits from their designated Stitch Red products to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health.

Lantern Moon's Stitch Red Clutch (© Jimmy Beans Wool)

As if that weren't enough, Stitch Red has teamed up with the biggest, hottest knitters in the design world to produce the Knit Red Book, a coffee table book with 30 patterns for red garments and accessories, all of which have been generously donated by the designers, who share tips on how to stay heart healthy as well as their personal experiences with the disease.

© Jimmy Beans Wool

The list of designers is insane: Jared Flood, Debbie Bliss, Stephen West, Ysolda Teague, Iris Shreier, Debbie Stoller, Ann Norling, Debbie Newton, Trisha Malcolm, Cecily G. MacDonald, Deborah Norville, Martin Storey, Melissa Morgan Oakes, Diane Soucy, Amy Swenson, Daniela Johannsenova, Andrea Jurgrau, Maia Landra, Barry Klein, Sarah Hatton, Kristen Ashbaugh-Helmrich, Kim Hargreaves, Kit Hutchin, Cornelia Tuttle Hamilton, Jeanne Giles, Tanis Gray, Kieran Foley, Norah Gaughan, and the list is growing. 

As if that weren't enough. 

You can find out more about the designers here.

The book will be available in June of this year, and I will be sure to post an update as soon as it is available. You can find out more information about Stitch Red here. 

And please, if you can, like Stitch Red on Facebook, follow them on Blogger, Twitter, and Ravelry, and spread the word.

In the meantime,

Happy, healthy hearts!

Flossie