Do you already know very basic knitting or very basic crochet?
Want to use some donated yarn and create some very basic warm or comfort items for the congregation and the wider community?
The yarn service group has been creating and donating hundreds of important improvements to the lives of our community for over twelve years. Seniors can lower the temp in their homes enough to save on their heating bills with our warm shawls, warmers for neck, ears, lap, fingers and feet, as well as simple tabard sweaters, hats and more! Lower heat bills means more $ for food and medicine!
Children get baby blankets, stuffed animals and toys. Families can go outside for nature and play, warm and secure. Members of the congregation who have lost a loved one, are ill or are going through tough times can get comfort items infused with reiki energy and loving wishes. ALL that from some time and yarn! It’s a superpower! How much time? Forget about dedicated knit/crochet time, all you need is to reclaim time otherwise lost over the course of day. TV-watching time! Waiting for doctors’ and other appointments! Waiting for a store to open! Enjoying a podcast or while in an important but long-winded meeting!
We don’t use complicated patterns so you don’t need to pay attention while you work! Some people only have experience knitting/crochet complicated patterns or stitches. The needs we serve are best served with simple shapes composed of simple knit, purl and easy crochet.
You CAN do complicated things for special needs if that is your only yarn ‘jam’ but if you’re worried about your skills – have no fear! You will get better at the simple stitches while helping people who really need you! With a simple plan, you can slip in a row or five here and there, and that’s how you end up with a six-foot scarf, one row at a time. All those wasted minutes in your day – no longer wasted! Woo-hoo! If you don’t know how to knit or crochet YET, come join us!
There are a hundred good tutorials on YouTube and we will cheer you on. This is not rocket science, really. Knit stitch is easy for a 5-year old to learn, ditto single or double crochet. A word on Creativity: We experienced people like to be creative! Simple stitches and items that can be done with rectangles and triangles might sound direly uncreative. It’s NOT: we use our amazing creativity to make hundreds of beautiful, sturdy, useful objects with the yarn that we have. Colors that compliment or contrast vs. the 8 balls of the same color that we don’t have; thinking up dozens of wonderful items that we can make from single skeins; subbing what we do have for The Usual Way We Do It; double up thin yarns to make the medium-weight yarn we need, on and on.
A constant thrill from all the cleverness that not being able to Just Buy It gives us. Who doesn’t love feeling victoriously clever? Best of all: once you are in the service groove, you can buy some yarn for yourself and gifts galore will flow from your needles and hooks. Every grand and greatgrand kid will have a Made By Grandma Herself blanket for all their first-year needs, and beloved others will have gorgeous, soft perfect items that no store sells.
The bulk of your work can be done in the wasted moments you reclaim, but once a month, we have a Zoom to cheer ourselves on! We work year-round, collecting items so we will have 100+ to donate as the winds of Autumn start to blow. Stuffies and toys for kids get donated in summer. Winds of adversity for our fellow RVUUFians blow year round, so having a ready-to-go stash of comfort is another goal.
Yarn work is a well-known stress-buster so we get a health and wellness boost from helping others.
Come join us!
Victoria Leo
victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com