[UPDATE: The entries are in! Visit my post to see if you can Help Share A Square! Thank you!]

Did y’all think I got lost in that nasty hotel room in Beaumont? I’m back home now, and hard at work here at the house. That Share A Square Project can be overwhelming! I have tons of work to do for it over the next couple of weeks. I can’t keep up with you folks!

But, I took a break to follow a link to my blog from Vivien at Inspiration Bit. She gave a little link love to her readers as she talked about her best blogging achievement. You can read for yourself what she had to say. She is worth the read any day of the week! Vivien’s blog is aptly named.

She wrote that post because it seems that Simonne from All Tips And Tricks is hosting a group writing project where she asks: “What is your best blogging achievement?”

Now, I’ll be honest with y’all. I know that you think that Texans run around bragging all the time. I don’t. At least, I don’t usually. But, I have something I’m doing that makes me “crow like a Banty rooster in a barnyard,” as Papaw would say. I’m writing about it in this post because Simonne is offering cash prizes to those who are voted the winners. The top prize is $100, and…well…I want it. You see, I can use that money to offset the cost of postage and yarn for Share A Square, because those Google ads aren’t paying off! When she posts the poll, I’ll be asking you to go and vote!

There are many things about this blog that make my Texan heart have some “braggin’ rights.”

Those accomplishments are piddly in comparison to the Share A Square Project, and it’s not even finished yet. If you aren’t familiar with it, you can read the Share A Square FAQ, or you can see the new Share A Square sub-domain. I haven’t started the December updates yet. You can visit the new Afghan Gallery to see a few of the afghans that we have put together for the children who will attend the Camp Sanguinity Cancer Camp next July (2008).

I’ve got more to photograph, and more are coming in every day. Each afghan has a square from forty-eight different people. Before December is out, I expect to have more than half of the 140 afghans we need. Since June, more than 6,500 squares have been sent to me from around the world.

Actually, the achievement is not the project itself. The true achievement is that so many people from all over the world have been given the opportunity to share with those less fortunate. And, share they have!

Squares have come from children as young as fourteen and from women old enough to be my grandmother (which makes them pretty darned old!). It’s not just retired women with time on their hands who are crocheting for this project. Mothers of young children, who are scrambling to keep their lives in order, have stopped long enough to make squares. I’ve gotten squares from people who are battling cancer themselves, and others with Parkinson’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer’s Disease, Chrones Disease, and from others who are legally blind. All of them have taken time to give of themselves. Heck, folks who can’t crochet have contributed yarn or money for it and have promoted it on their blogs.

Yes, many of the squares have come from the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii. I’ve also gotten squares from our neighbors in Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, British Columbia, and Quebec in Canada. Women in Taiwan, Sweden, Scotland, England, Spain, Mexico, Australia, South Australia, and many, many women in Japan have all sent squares for afghans to make some little kid in Texas smile.

I’m busting at the seams with pride at “meeting” all of the people who have contributed to Share A Square. I have to say that I’m pretty dadgum proud that I started the project right here on this blog.

And, I’m humbled by the outpouring of love that I have seen. In the first post for Share A Square, I said that I was Searching For People With Big Hearts. I think I found quite a few of those, didn’t I?

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The Share A Square project has ended, and the afghans were delivered on July 7th, 2008. Although we will not continue that project, an exciting NEW endeavor, called the Good Medicine Project is in progress for summer camp 2009. We hope you will join us.]