When she was just a little girl, Janet Holmes needed something to occupy her hands and her mind. Her mother had died when she was 6 years old, and she lived in misery with relatives.
So she turned to knitting and crocheting. She had no instructor.
“I taught myself, as a child,” said Holmes. “I just had to do something to keep my hands busy.”
She found that she loved making things and loved giving them away. The more she did it, the better she got at it. When she got married, she knitted sweaters, scarves and hats for her own children and then her grandchildren.
Holmes, who lives in East Vancouver and turned 80 at the end of May, still keeps plenty busy knitting and crocheting — on behalf of children she never meets, but whom she knows have serious needs of their own. She figures she spends up to four hours per day creating as many as 800 hats and scarves per year. One year she made it all the way to 1,000 items, but figured maybe that was getting out of hand — “so I cut it back to 800,” she said.
It all got going after she first offered a handful of homemade hats to an area hospital to warn newborns’ heads, she said. She was astonished that her gift was turned down, she said.
That’s when word spread through her family and reached Judi Church, who worked for the state Department of Social and Health Services. “Judy came over and said, ‘I’ll bring you yarn. If you want to make hats and scarfs, I’ll take them around to all these great groups I know can use them,’ ” Holmes recalled.
Church has been retired for five years, but she still distributes the hats and scarfs to needy children via her workplace connections at state Community Services Offices in Vancouver, Kelso and Aberdeen. The latter “is in Gray’s Harbor County and that’s a pretty poor county,” Church said. “Janet makes a lot of difference in places like that.”
The yarn is mostly donated by staffers in those DSHS offices, Holmes said. “I’m floored with the amount of yarn people supply me with. It’s wonderful,” she said.
After at least 4,000 hats and other items in all, Holmes said, she has started branching out with hats that look like pumpkins, bumblebees, ladybugs and cuddly bears.
“I really enjoy it and I try to come up with new ideas all the time,” she said. “I do probably six hats and scarfs a day.”
She’s never seen the needy kids whose heads and necks enjoy her warmth, she said, but that doesn’t matter. “I know they love my hats. I know there are so many needy children out there. It just breaks my heart knowing they don’t have anything warm. I would like to encourage people who have the ability to do something like this, too,” she said.
Bits ‘n’ Pieces appears Fridays and Saturdays. If you have a story you’d like to share, email bits@columbian.com.
