Crafting with the Crones

Last week was my first session at a local retirement home, where I will be facilitating a crafts circle twice a month. Twelve women with varying degrees of ability and mobility showed up in the home's activities room, eager to participate. Most of them want to make dolls to send to impoverished children overseas, but I quickly found that the templates I had been using for our own craft group at the hospital are way too small for arthritic hands to manage. Several more women want to knit and crochet warm clothing to send overseas, and several more want to LEARN to knit and crochet--a problem because I don't do either! 

So, after only one session, I had to re-think this whole craft circle thing. First, I had to come up with a prototype for a very simple doll with very large pieces that could be easily manipulated by people with minimal dexterity. Soooo, introducing "Dollie" and "Dollie Junior", my new designs for little dolls to go to Africa. OK, so I'm not much of a doll designer let alone much of a sewer, but the body and head are sewn together to make one large piece for easy sewing--and stuffing!--and the arms and "baby" are large enough to turn inside out, sew and stuff with little effort. If anyone out there has a simpler pattern they'd like to send my way, by all means do so.

 Second, I have to go out and recruit a knitter to accompany me, and I might have found a willing accomplice in a friend who is a knitting fanatic and is actually starting to infect me with "knitting envy". Her own women's craft group are making these luscious shawls out of big, chunky synthetic yarn that are to die for! 

The women at the retirement center are a delight. A couple of them actually have their old sewing machines in their rooms, and just the idea of sewing for somebody again got them talking about "back in the day" when several of them made their family's clothing. They have a strong desire to "give back", having lived good lives, and they expressed wanting to do something with their time that will be useful to someone else.  I think this is going to be a challenging situation for me, but I also have a feeling I'm really going to enjoy it, and learn a lot from these women. Maybe my girlfriend will actually get ME knitting something, too!