Random Acts of Kindness

While reading forum posts on Ravelry at the beginning of the week I found a group called Random Acts of Kindness. The idea is that you post a wishlist and then read through other people's wishlists; if you see a wish you can grant, you go ahead and do so, and hopefully someone will grant a wish for you as well.

I loved the idea of this and so I went ahead and joined the group. But being a new member and it being close to the end of the month I didn't feel like I could post an actual wishlist. Instead I just asked for people to do some simple Random Acts of Kindness of their own.

I asked for people to handwrite a thank you note for one of the gifts they had received and post it to the person who'd given them the gift; to be totally selfish and pick something to knit just for themselves; or to go to a 'Finished Items' thread on a Ravelry group and pick six items to 'love' (which is kind of the Ravelry equivalent of 'liking' a post) which they thought needed a bit more attention.

I didn't expect anything back from that but I looked through the wishlist thread to see what I could give back to someone else. Imagine my surprise when I logged onto Ravelry the next day to find that I had been sent a pattern as a gift.

A very generous person had treated me to the pattern in memory of a family member. It wasn't even a pattern I had mentioned wanting in my wishlist, I'd mentioned it in my New Year's Resolutions post and she obviously looked it up and found it for me. I can't wait to start.

As I'd already decided to treat myself to it at some point in the future, on Sunday I put the money I was going to spend on that pattern towards a pattern for someone else in the wishlists thread. It felt so good that I can't wait to do more Random Acts of Kindness.

Have you ever done anything like that?