Crocheting by memory: Blindness doesn’t stop 99-year-old
Althea Beil’s fingers move nimbly across the purple yarn. With a series of tugs and twists, she slowly adds another row to the kitchen towel she is crocheting.
She talks as she goes, her fingers doing the work on autopilot. Her eyes don’t even focus on what she’s crafting, because they can’t.
Beil lost her sight about three years ago. She’s continued her lifelong hobby by memory, as she approaches her 100th birthday.
“I can do pretty much any stitch,” she told me proudly. “I have to feel it with my hands.”
Her story is quite inspiring.
Beil’s grandmother taught her to crochet when she was 8, just as the Great Depression hit. Buying yarn wasn’t a priority. So she tore apart old sweaters that her aunts gave her and reused that material.
Over nine decades, Beil has created pretty much anything you could think of that could be made of yarn: afghans, place mats, towels, wash cloths, Christmas trees and wreaths, snowmen, Easter bunnies and eggs, scarves, hats, gloves.
Then she gives them away.
“I have something for every holiday, for every room in my house,” said her granddaughter, Kristy Bixler. “There’s pieces of her work everywhere, from Vermont to Florida and to the West Coast.”
Beil has plenty of people to give her creations to. In addition to her son and daughter, she has six grandchildren, a dozen great grandchildren and 13 great-great grandchildren.
She also gives them to friends and workers at Cedarbrook Senior Care and Rehabilitation in Fountain Hill, where she has lived for nearly the last three years and is known as “Nana B.”
“I don’t miss anybody on our floor,” she said as she crocheted on a warm afternoon in the shade of the nursing home’s gazebo.
Her hobby has helped her through some rough times.
Beil said she was depressed when she came to live at Cedarbrook. Her second husband and a daughter had passed away not long before, and she’d recently lost her sight.
Staff at Cedarbrook encouraged her to continue to crochet. It took a little while to get a feel for the softer cotton yarns, but now it’s a breeze.
During the pandemic, she spent a lot of time isolated in her room, as nursing homes nationwide locked down and stopped allowing visits to protect residents. Crocheting gave her something to do to pass the time.
“This is all I had,” Beil said.
She made pumpkins during Halloween and ornaments at Christmas.
“She didn’t sit in the room and dwell on, ‘Well, I’m stuck by myself.’ She was concentrating on what she could do with the project that she had in her hands,” said Bixler, of York County.
“If it wasn’t for her crocheting, I don’t know what she would have done.”
Beil, who last May beat COVID-19, always has worked with her hands.
She grew up near Northampton, in the village of Seemsville.
She worked in several clothing factories, including Tama Manufacturing, before becoming a beautician and opening Althea’s Beauty Shop on Weaversville Road.
She has sewed and quilted, and made a wedding gown for one of her daughters, Nancy. She taught crocheting at A.C. Moore and participated in crocheting groups at a senior center. They made gloves, scarves and baby blankets to be donated to hospitals and school children.
When Beil gets a new pattern, a friend at Cedarbrook reads it to her, Bixler said. Then Beil’s hands duplicate it.
She counts the stitches and uses safety pins to mark her starting and stopping points.
“She has this memory,” Bixler said. “It’s pretty amazing to us.”
She attributes that to her grandmother’s positive attitude.
“If you say something to her, she’s got a smart comeback, even at 99 years old,” Bixler said. “She’s just a very friendly, will-talk-to-anybody type of person.”
To celebrate her 100th birthday in September, Beil already has made more than 100 scrubbies, each about the size of a hand, to give to family and friends.
“I praise God he gave me this feel, that I could do this,” Beil said. “It’s very relaxing for me and keeps my mind off my troubles.”