Once a month a small room at St. Mary’s Anglican Church fills with the sounds of prayer, clack of knitting and trill of ladies’ laughter.
The Prayer Shawl group starts each session with a prayer, passes on a prayer chain for later use, and then gets down to crafting prayer shawls.
“Now we’re chatting about all sorts of other things,” Rosemary Dominy says with a laugh during the month-end meeting.
Pat Taylor, among the earliest of members, figures they’ve been meeting for about seven years in the small room at the back of the church.
“We used to meet twice a month but people are so busy,” Dominy said. “And people that don’t come are still working. We do enjoy the little group, even though we’re not here all the time.”
They knit prayer shawls – a lot of them.
“They’re not just for bereavement or sad times, they’re for celebration as well,” Dominy said. “The shawls are always first and when there’s a good stock, we’re allowed to do other things.”
The shawls take up significant yarn, but leave behind large remnants as well. So they knit things like mittens and toques for the homeless and for Christmas hampers.
“They go to many, many, different places, not the least of which is the street people,” Dominy said.
The church’s latest offerings are knitted muffs introduced by member Elaine Schaumburg.
“It was purely by accident. I read in a local newspaper about a British organization that had discovered patients with Alzheimer’s, their agitation was calmed by these muffs people were knitting,” Schaumburg said. “Instead of picking at their pants or whatever … constantly in motion, this gave them something to do and made a noticeable effect on the level of anxiety perhaps on some of these Alzheimer’s patients.”
The Oak Bay knitter made a foray into the Boutique de Laine on Estevan Avenue.
“I got some wool from her and I knit for a while. I have two friends who helped knit some of them,” she said.
Then she shared the idea with her group at St. Mary’s.
“The little knitting group there pitched in and I took 10 to the Kiwanis Pavilion, I probably have another 10 now that the members at St. Mary’s produced so now I’m looking for new homes for these,” she said. “I think there are other facilities that might be in need of these.”
With a basic pattern provided by Schaumburg, the knitted tubes are bright, colourful, multi-textured and covered in “doodads” as Dominy calls them. They’re careful to attach only fabric “doodads” and no buttons or other potentially dangerous items.
“There’s nothing on there that can hurt them,” said knitter Shirley Holliday, fiddling with a loop on one of the bright muffs. “They like the things they can pull on or fiddle with.”
Schaumburg was inspired for the first donation by a good friend. The late Brian Beckett who died in 2013, was heavily involved in supporting the Kiwanis Pavilion, serving as president of Oak Bay Kiwanis and on the board of the pavilion.
“He did not have Alzheimer’s but he was one of those quietly competent men, who sadly has passed away,” she said.
With him in mind she donated the first batch to Kiwanis Pavilion, home to 122 residents, many with special care needs related to dementia.
“We have a number of ladies who are knitting them,” said Leslie Johnston, chair of the Kiwanis Pavilion Foundation board. “It helps comfort the client, they can put their hands in it and they can turn them around and around. It’s a comforting thing for them.”
