MAGGIE’S SEW GOOD!
The Kiwi crafter’s on a crusade
Belinda, a friend who had recovered from breast cancer. On the way home, I crashed my motorbike. I hit black ice on the Desert Road, wrote off the bike and broke my collarbone.
Another good friend, Diane, took me for an appointment at Wellington Hospital a few days later. Diane makes beautiful quilts which she donates to the neonatal unit there. While I was waiting, I read an article about a group of ladies in Auckland who were knitting ‘knockers’ – cotton prosthetic breasts – for mastectomy patients.
There seemed to be a reason why I was sitting next to a friend who I admired for her charity crafting while reading an article about knitted knockers less than a week after I had visited Belinda. Even though I hadn’t knitted for 25 years, I thought, ‘I can do that.’ I felt the nudge to do some good.
Over the next few months, as my collarbone began to mend, I made my first few sets of knockers. It was around the same time that Belinda died – five weeks after discovering her cancer had returned – so I dedicated them to her. I posted a message on Facebook to get others involved and five of us ended up making more than 150 pairs.
I delivered the knockers to the Cancer Society in January 2015, while on my way to hospital for surgery. They asked if I knew anyone else who could sew. I realised then that there was a need for someone to connect crafters to charities, so along with my little group of knitters, my ‘brains trust’, we came up with Crafty Volunteers.
We ran our first promotion – a Peggy Square Craft-a-thon
– in September 2015 after receiving a huge donation of colourful acrylic yarn. It was supposed to be a 10-day series of events, where we would distribute yarn and collect squares to make into blankets. But we ended up taking close to six months to finish sewing the squares together, then delivering the blankets – there were 200 of them!
We still receive squares and meet twice a month at our base, Nancy’s Stitch Studio in Wellington, to sew them into blankets. We ask for 15cm crocheted or knitted squares, but people also send the weirdest and most wonderful shapes. We put them all together and they still look amazing.
For another project, crafters were invited to knit, crochet or sew bears for children and adults going through a difficult time – we ended up with more than 250 bears. We also held a couple of sewing events following the Kaikoura earthquake, which included making pressure wraps for stressed dogs. Plus, we host knitting sessions at libraries in the Wellington region.
Earlier this year, one of the nurses at the neonatal intensive care unit told us they had received some donated wool and asked if we could help replenish their stocks of baby clothes and blankets. We sent out emails, and blogged and posted about it on Facebook
during the course of the next four or five weeks. In return, we received hundreds of items – again, from all over Aotearoa.
The group has just started getting into repurposing old textiles. We’ve been given some ‘end of life’ linen from the Intercontinental Hotel and have begun turning some into cot sheet sets. The lifeguard rash shirts we were donated are now being repurposed into sunsmart gear for foster kids and children at low decile schools.
One of our group rules is that anything made by our crafters has to stay in New Zealand. I’ve been to developing countries such Nepal and there’s no denying there is need there, but there’s also so much need in our own backyard and I think we should start here.
At the moment, Crafty Volunteers is pretty much cash-less, so the costs are mostly covered by me. We don’t know who receives the items that the crafters make, but we do want the recipients to know that a random stranger cares for them by providing a gift made with love.”