Raffle for the Critters

Okay, you've read this post about the turtles and the excellent folks at the Center for Wildlife, right? So I thought about this blog contest idea a bit and I've gone through my stash and picked a few things - with a combined street value of several hundred dollars - that I think will be of interest to folks. So here are the items that will be up for grabs:


Approximately 6oz. of merino roving from a farm in Massachusetts (I've forgotten which)


Two 100g skeins of Araucania Nature Wool Chunky and nine 25g skeins of Alpaca with a Twist Landscapes (discontinued baby alpaca/silk)


Five 100g balls of Paton's UpCountry 100% soft wool singles (sadly discontinued)


Approx. 1kg cone of orange-brown marled superfine alpaca yarn, fingering weight


Seventeen 25g balls of Austermann Gold der Anden 70% baby alpaca/30% merino sportweight, grey marl


Fifteen 25g balls of Austermann Gold der Anden 70% baby alpaca/30% merino sportweight, blue


Four balls of Brown Sheep's Wildfoote and two balls of Regia Stretch self-striping sock yarn - total of three pairs' worth of sock yarn

Since the goal here is to raise as much money as possible for the selfless work these folks do, I decided that a raffle would be the best way to do it. So here's how this will work:

1. First go to this page and make a donation of at least $5 to the Center for Wildlife. Remember, donations to them are tax deductible (at least here in the US - I'm not sure if it works that way for international donations).

2. Then e-mail me at mel daht vassey at gmail daht com and let me know how much you've donated. Or you can leave me a comment, which goes to the same address. All comments have to be approved by me before being published, and I won't publish individual donation amounts.

3. Every $5 donated will count as one entry into the raffle, so a $20 donation will enter your name 4 times, a $50 donation 10 times, etc. The more you donate, the better your chances of winning something. I trust that people will be honest on this, but I can always go back to the folks at the Center for Wildlife and check up, especially since I told them today that I was planning this.

4. I will leave this raffle open for the next two weeks, so any donation through 11:59PM on 22 September 2008, will be eligible for the drawing. After the deadline is reached, I will use a random number generator to select seven winning "tickets". As in a real raffle, persons with multiple entries may be able to win multiple items. The winning "tickets" will be ordered numerically, so that the first winner will get their first pick of the item they'd prefer, and so on down the line.

So go and do a good thing. You can claim a tax deduction and you may just get some fabulous prizes out of it, so you'll win either way!