Fiber artists join forces for charity work

By AMBER PERRY amber@appenmedia.com

MILTON, Ga. — In a back room of the Milton Branch Library, around a dozen women, and the brother of one, Scott Eldredge, sat crocheting, knitting and quilting.

Some were working on individual projects, but most were adding to a colorful donation pile at the end of the table. The group gathers every Thursday at 11 a.m. to contribute handmade items for charities in the Atlanta area.

Peggy Meyer-Salzmann, a member since 2016, takes charge by compiling project lists and responsibilities.

“Crafters will save the world,” founding member Dena Kennedy said.

The camaraderie of the group, fastened by a common love of crafting, mirrors the soul of the movie “How to Make an American Quilt,” in which a woman discovers her grandmother’s quilting group.

At the library, group members were talking and laughing and sharing their stories around the table, all the while rhythmically moving their hands over different sizes, shapes and colors of soft fabric.

A few weren’t looking down. Their hands knew what to do after spending most of their lives weaving fabric in and out, using a needle, or two. Each found fiber art in different ways, some from their mothers and grandmothers, some through a neighbor.

Others needed something to do on frequent long road trips, like Debbie Morris, Elredge’s sister, who said crocheting on her husband’s long work trips saved her marriage.

Jenny Hawes, more a knitter, said she too needed something to do on frequent road trips to Canada. She used to live there.

For some, crafting was initially sought for a practical purpose, like Monica Phillips who was a first-time mother in her 40s, wanting to dress her newborn. Leigha Jonestock works as a director of a microschool and sees the group as an educational opportunity that she can bring back with her to implement.

And, Sangeeta Mehra picked up crafting as a hobby and saw the group as an opportunity to meet people, having just moved to the area when she joined five years ago.

Sharing a gift

Meetings have been going on for about 15 years. They began when Phillips and a woman named Miss Nancy took a crochet class with Kennedy, who managed the now-closed Only Ewes Yarn shop. Phillips wanted to continue classes, but in a more informal way where people could bring their talents and share them with others for free.

Phillips recruited many of the women. Others have found the group through word of mouth. Mary Natelli told her co-worker Maureen Wales at Alpharetta Elementary School about the crafting group. Others found the group through fliers, or observed its work when casting their ballots. The library is one of Milton’s voting locations.

The group used to meet every other week, but members found they wanted more time together working on projects for the community and its “own little world,” Meyer-Salzmann said. The group has also grown and switched rooms at the library to accommodate the size.

Overwhelmed with emotion, tears in her eyes, founding member Dena Kennedy couldn’t express in words what it meant to see the group grow and transform into what it is today. She later sent a message describing it as a “blessing.”

“It truly has been a blessing for me to find so many like-minded people over the years — these lovely souls who treasure this ability that we’ve been given to make things with our hands … and who have such generous hearts that want to share these gifts with the world,” Kennedy wrote.

Projects

Some members oversee donations for individual organizations. Meyer-Salzmann oversees collection for Good Mews, a nokill cat rescue facility. The group does the most work for North Fulton Community Charities and donated nearly 400 handmade goods as well as toys and food last year.

Margie Smith manages collections for the charity’s senior Christmas baskets. She also helps fill them on-site, but decided against participating in delivery to homes. Patti Shauff interjected and said Smith is a “softy” and didn’t want to hear the seniors’ sad stories.

“You’re right, you’re right,” Smith said.

Northside Hospital sees a lot of handmade accessories as well, receiving nearly 170 items last year from the crafting group. Members have donated to nearly 20 organizations since forming 15 years ago, including a few that are out of state. Founding member Monica Phillips sent 75 crocheted heart brooches to her father in Kentucky.

“He’s having the best time just rolling around the nursing home handing out hearts,” Phillips said.

A memorable time for the group was the COVID-19 pandemic. While the library was closed, members met up at Wills Park, and the cold didn’t stop them.

“There were some days the fingers didn’t work, due to the cold, but we got together to talk and laugh,” MeyerSalzmann said.

Over the pandemic, the group made a couple of thousand masks in addition to ear loops and ear saves, which ties to the back of the head to relieve pressure from long-term mask wearing.

The next big project is decorating the library for March, which is National Crochet Month. Members were already working on an installation for the library’s summer reading program, deciding what colors to make life-sized stick figures.

The stick figures were a design pulled from a book, which listed directions written in what appeared to be a foreign language — a soup of abbreviations expressing crocheting direction.

Art form

There are two camps of fiber artists, for the most part — the crocheters and the knitters. The group started as a crocheting group, and that was the chosen craft of many that Thursday. But it has branched out and invites anyone with a love for crafting and for giving back.

There was a consensus among the crocheters that knitting is less forgiving. Phillips said you can easily spot mistakes in crochet work and rip it out.

“You ‘frog’ it is what they call it — take out the stitches and then just redo it,” Phillips said. “Rip it, frog it, get it?”

Even while tightly crocheting a baby hat, Hawes said she prefers knitting because she can’t read crochet stitches very well. Smith, a kindred spirit, was knitting a lightweight, airy scarf in two hues of blue, separated in halves but done unintentionally. For design, Smith swears by allowing the yarn to do the work for her.

She demonstrated the process, repetitively looping the yarn around the needle and pulling out.

While many projects take a simpler form, Meyer-Salzmann showed off a more intricate work named “Healing Circles” hanging on the wall outside of the meeting room.

The wall art looked like a mandala, consisting of smaller, crocheted circles attached to the rim of a larger one at the center, made by Daniel Trussel, a former member who recently died.

Below the mandala, an inscription contained a quote from Linda Joy Meyers, “We are all joined in a circle of stories.”