Let’s give the Twiddlemuff knitters a big hand
Their hands dive and dart like swift precise birds building a nest, and in a way that’s what they’re doing — a nest for hands, not their own but other hands that need a special kind of touch, focus and stimulation.
“Many of us know someone with it, and it’s a way of paying it forward,” Janice Reid says of the women — and men — who knit Twiddlemuffs with her at the Hamilton Public Library.
“It” is Alzheimer’s. And Twiddlemuffs? Well, Twiddlemuffs are muffs made out of yarn and studded, tufted, sequined and otherwise trimmed, inside and out, with “bits and bobs” — colourful buttons, bows, pom poms, bobbins, baubles, fabric patches and whatnots.
There are a dozen or so of the knitters when I visit the second floor of the Hamilton Public Library central branch, and they’ve already got more than 30 muffs done.
They meet every Friday, technically from two to three but they often get there at noon and go way past three.
Not only hands fly but time flies when you’re having yarn.
The hands for which the hands are knitting the Twiddlemuffs are sometimes uncertain, restless and random in their reach and grasp. They belong to those with dementia.
“The Twiddlemuffs are for those with mid- to late-stage Alzheimer’s and they (the Twiddlemuffs) are a way for them to have busy, occupied hands,” says Karen Robins, a public education co-ordinator with the Alzheimer Society of Hamilton and Halton.
“And they’re failure free.” The muffs, with their different textures and small articles of touch, help stimulate and focus the movement and tactile sensation of the hands of those with dementia. They’re calming.
The idea for them started with a knitting group in the United Kingdom. It quickly caught on.
The large group at central branch has been making them for several months, and there are other knitting groups elsewhere in Hamilton, including at some other library branches, also producing Twiddlemuffs.
Janice has been knitting at the library for some time now and volunteered to co-ordinate the 20 or 30 knitters involved in the Twiddlemuffs project. Why her?
“I’m patient,” she says with a smile. The idea is to get about 40 or 50 done and present them to the Alzheimer Society of Hamilton and Halton, perhaps on Thursday, Sept. 21, which is World Alzheimer’s Day.
Originally, the hope was for 10 but it’s been such a success they’re upping their goal.
Pat Davies shows me a beautiful blue and white Tweedlemuff that she worked at, on and off, for a couple of weeks.
“It’s made of baby wool but it’s not really wool. It’s acrylic,” she explains. “Real wool could be damaging to their hands from scratching.”
Janice is proud of the talents and work of all the women here at the central and the one man, Steven Veldhoen — though he’s not working on the Twiddlemuffs but a big gorgeous blanket for his cousin. Still, it’s part of the esprit de corps and friendship here.
Gordana Masic knits distinctively with thread on the left — the European way. She’s from Croatia originally. “I learned from my grandmother when I was five,” she tells me.
Ineta Baltimore by contrast took up knitting only four months ago but is already doing beautiful work. Ginette Simard, sitting beside her, has done four muffs already and is now working on a “twirly skirt.”
The Twiddlemuff effort grew out of the knitting group that Adam Van Sickle helped set up two years ago at the HPL for seniors and disabled in the central branch’s Disability Information Services Program.
The knitting group was supposed to be for only for six months. “But here it is two years later and still growing,” says Adam, resource information specialist at Hamilton Health Sciences’ Regional Rehabilitation Patient and Family Learning Centre.
“Now they have a special meaning (the Twiddlemuffs for Alzheimer’s) to getting together.”
“The knitters are stupendous,” says Karen.
And so are their Twiddlemuffs.