When Amelia Day and Linda Dees took a knitting class at the Mary G. Hardin Center for Cultural Arts in Gadsden last year, they never dreamed it would lead to a ministry impacting hundreds of people locally and internationally.
The women had heard of people using knitting as a way to reach out to those in need but they were both beginners. Still they decided to embark on their first knitting project — to finish 100 scarves for Way of the Cross, a neighborhood soup kitchen, by Christmas 2009.
“I figured Linda had lost her mind,” Day recalled. “This was in May.”
But by the time December rolled around, the women, with the help of a group they formed at their church, MeadowBrook Baptist, Gadsden, had not only met their goal but exceeded it. They created 200 scarves to hand out at the annual Christmas party at Way of the Cross.
Like Day and Dees, most of the members of the Ladies Fellowship Group didn’t know how to knit or crochet before joining.
“I just fully believe that this is a God thing, because we can’t all teach or sing or do other things, but in a small way, I just feel like this is the way to keep the Lord’s work going and to touch people,” Dees said.
And the women involved are impacting each other’s lives, too.
“We’ve created a bond among us,” Dees said. “We’ve cried together, we’ve prayed together and we’ve laughed together.”
The group meets twice a month to have prayer, a devotional and conversation about current and upcoming projects. About half of the 12 to 15 women are members of the Etowah Baptist Association church, whose pastor is Randy Gunter.
So far, they’ve produced the scarves for Way of the Cross, slippers for a missionary in Jordan, skullcaps and salvation bracelets for a church member’s trip to Africa, prayer shawls for members of their church and community and chemo caps for patients at The Kirklin Clinic in Birmingham.
“I would be very happy if we could get more involved in the prayer shawls,” group member Rose Ann Wade said. “What’s so neat about that is that when you make a prayer afghan, you go around and have everyone do a few rows of it and as they work, they pray and that’s really meaningful for us to do something like that.”
It’s meaningful for those who receive the prayer shawls, too.
“We took a prayer shawl to one woman whose son had cancer and the woman said, ‘I can’t believe they did this for me. Why would they do this for me? They don’t really know me,’” Day said.
“And I told her, ‘Because that’s what Christians do. We help each other.’”
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