A couple of dozen Northbrook old ladies know you’ve got yarn gathering dust around your house, and they want it.
The Northbrook Knitting and Crocheting Club knits clothing and blankets for poor people, and they need a little help with the raw material.
“Anybody who knits always has those extra balls of yarn they can’t use,” said member Carol Wald.
Don’t worry about calling them old. They won’t even let in members unless they’re over 55, though one, who they admit was younger, “sneaked in” a few years ago, and she got a lot done.
Some of them have arthritis, so they have switched to crocheting, which can be done with only one good hand. And they do a lot: there were more than 300 finished pieces waiting to go out to various charities Friday, and even harsh inspection could reveal no flaws.
“We had a sale, and it raised about $200 to buy yarn,” longtime member Phyllis Kosner said. “But we don’t want to sell any of it. We just want to give it away.”
The sale didn’t make a lot of sense, anyway, Wald said.
“We sold it for less than it cost in materials,” she said.
And they use a lot of materials.
More than 70 articles of warm winter clothing were waiting to be sorted and delivered to the North Chicago Veterans Administration program that finds places to live for homeless veterans and their families. It’s just the winter installment, Kosner said. More will go out every other month or so.
“We have veterans who don’t have anything when we find them places in Section 8 housing,” said Terri Washburn of the James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in Waukegan. “It’s always great to give them hats and scarves and blankets, for kids, all the way up.”
The Northbrook ladies take it personally. Five of them circled a table piled with finished knitting in Kosner’s house, as they decided which things to set aside for one special VA family.
“It’s a family, and the lady’s pregnant,” explained Clara Mueller.
“This one’s good,” said Eileen Brottman, holding up a pink and blue baby blanket. “We don’t know if it’s going to be a girl or a boy.”
The ladies knit meet to knit at the Northbrook Park District’s Leisure/Senior Center, 3323 Walters Ave., for two hours at 10 a.m. Wednesdays. Several say that they knit for at least two hours at home every day.
“It’s very satisfying when you finish something,” Brottman said.
The meetings are very social, they say, and the members have become close.
“If someone doesn’t come, we call them to see how they are,” Kosner said.
The club is about 24 years old, founded by Hanc Weiner, a member Pat Thalman calls “the heart and soul” of the group.
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“She’s a great teacher,” Thalman said.
That’s important, especially for newer members, who often don’t know how to knit before they join.
Wiener was out of town Friday.
“We have a lot of snowbirds,” Thalman said.
Among the organizations that get the clubs production are Chicago’s Mercy Home for Boys and Girls, Wheeling’s Walt Whitman School, The Arc of Illinois, The Public Action to Deliver Shelter site at Deerfield’s B’nai Jehoshua Beth Elohim congregation, the Whittier Elementary School in Waukegan and the Women’s Center of Greater Chicagoland.
The ladies all live in Northbrook, but they hail from four continents, they say, and everybody gets along.
“It’s a family,” Brottman said. “It was like a miracle for me. I lost my husband recently, There was such an out pouring from everybody.”
The knitters say they’d appreciate it if people with extra yarn would drop it off at the Leisure Center desk. Kosner said even if it is a little bit, the group can put it together with something else.
“A lot of times, when grandma dies, there’s a lot of yarn left,” Mueller said.
Twitter @IrvLeavitt