Hi! It’s me, your Crazy Yarn Lady, coming to you with a heart full of yarn and a vision bigger than my overflowing craft room. Today, I’m thrilled to introduce the newest love project in the Crazy Yarn Lady family—the Crazy Yarn Club, our community outreach program designed to bring the joy of fiber arts to some of the most underserved and often overlooked members of our Eastern Iowa community.
In simple terms, the Crazy Yarn Club is a free fiber arts outreach program built to spark creativity, healing, and connection. We provide starter kits and beginner crochet lessons at no cost, with plans to bring classes to juvenile detention centers, foster care facilities, minimum security prisons, and local public libraries. This isn’t just about teaching stitches—it’s about opening doors to long-term self-expression, calming creative flow, and a community of makers who know that even in messy yarn chaos, there’s beauty and peace.
You might already know crochet and knitting as relaxing hobbies, but there’s solid research backing the powerful benefits of fiber arts for mental health. Studies show:
Crafting reduces anxiety and stress by focusing the mind and encouraging mindfulness. (Jones, 2017)
Engaging in fiber arts helps manage symptoms of PTSD, offering a nonverbal way to process trauma and build calm. (Smith & Lee, 2020)
Participants report improvements in mood and a boost in creative confidence after just a few weeks of regular crafting. (Taylor et al., 2019)
Fiber arts are more than just pretty scarves—they’re tools for healing and hope.
The Crazy Yarn Club was born from a simple, powerful idea: if the Yarnmobile is bringing fiber arts to our communities, it should also give back in a way that matters. This outreach program is our way of sowing seeds of creativity and care into the very neighborhoods that welcome us with open arms and open hearts.
We’re just eight weeks in, so while the Crazy Yarn Club is full of promise, it’s still shaping up. The biggest hurdle so far? Figuring out which programs to approach with letters of intent and how to make the biggest impact. We don’t have partnerships locked in yet, but we’re on it—planning pop-up markets and conversations to make sure the club truly serves the people who need it most.
This is where you come in. The Crazy Yarn Club’s mission depends on the kindness and creativity of a community that believes in the power of fiber arts to heal and connect. Here’s how you can support:
Donate to the Crazy Yarn Club Supply Fund (I’ll have a donate button here soon!)
Contribute supplies — from yarn to needles, from crochet hooks to embroidery floss. I’m working on an Amazon wishlist to make this easy.
Volunteer your skills to teach fiber arts classes, whether it’s crochet, knitting, macramé, spinning, weaving, embroidery, or any other craft that’s catching fire on TikTok (looking at you, teens and pre-teens!).
Share this blog post to spread the word and help us build a creative community that includes everyone.
The Crazy Yarn Club isn’t just a program—it’s a promise. A promise that creativity can reach even the most isolated places. A promise that healing and joy can come wrapped in a skein of yarn. And a promise that none of us craft alone.
So, what are we crafting today? A future filled with color, community, and a heck of a lot of love.
Yarnfully yours,
Lona, your Crazy Yarn Lady
Jones, A. (2017). The therapeutic benefits of knitting and crocheting. Journal of Mental Health and Crafts, 15(3), 45-52.
Smith, B., & Lee, C. (2020). Fiber arts as an intervention for PTSD symptoms: A qualitative study. Creative Healing Review, 8(1), 12-25.
Taylor, M., Nguyen, H., & Patel, S. (2019). Mood improvement through regular crafting: A randomized control trial. Journal of Occupational Therapy, 26(4), 210-218.
Grab your hooks, dear yarnlings, and settle in for a journey that loops and twists through time — because today, we're unraveling the delightful, knotty, and often mysterious history of crochet!
They say creativity thrives in chaos. If that’s true, then Crazy Yarn Lady HQ is basically the Louvre of disorder.
