Their knitting fulfills a passion and a need

Kathy Ash loves to knit - but she has a problem to which many crafters can relate.

"No one in my family needs anything else," she said ruefully one recent evening as she sat with a half-dozen like-minded knitters in a church conference room in Carlisle. "There are only so many hand-knitted sweaters, hats, and mittens you can actually give away until your friends and relatives have enough."

So when Ash saw a notice in her local newspaper for knitters interested in committing their talents to a good cause, she was intrigued. Along with her neighbors Sheila French and Lynn Knight, she attended the gathering. There she met Linda Myers-Tierney and Myers-Tierney's then 13-year-old daughter, Lauren, who also love to knit.

Myers-Tierney had connected recently with a homeless advocacy group in Boston as she looked for a way to combine her enjoyment of knitting with her passion for charitable causes. She and her daughter, as well as the other women, were soon busy knitting all the heavy scarves and hats they could crank out - and knowing that their efforts would help keep the homeless warm for the winter, rather than sitting forgotten in drawers or hope chests.

Myers-Tierney's group, which calls itself KISS, for Knitting in Service Society, is just one example of an increasingly widespread movement that combines handiwork with charitable outreach.

At Carleton-Willard Village, a retirement community in Bedford, Kay Graff leads a group called KnitWits that makes afghans for the nearby VA hospital and tiny caps for newborns at Emerson Hospital in Concord. The Carlisle group makes caps, too, which are sent to impoverished communities in Africa to help protect babies there from life-threatening hypothermia.

For Marilyn Converse, on the other hand, the current beneficiaries of her handiwork are a lot closer to home.

Converse is an oncology nurse at Emerson Hospital, and she joined with several friends a few years ago for a most unusual effort. The women learned to crochet prayer shawls - and then sent them to Russia, where they were presented to women whose children had been killed in the 2004 Beslan school hostage massacre.

Converse found the experience of creating prayer shawls to be so personally profound, even without ever meeting the recipients, that she suggested to the group that they make some shawls for her to bring her patients.

"For the past two years, I've been presenting my end-of-life patients with a prayer shawl," Converse said. "I say a prayer as I give it to them, and make a little ceremonial speech. I also give them to patients who have just received bad diagnoses. The shawls are wonderful in terms of the comfort they bring patients and their families. . . . It's a wonderful thing for us and for the patients alike."

And the more she witnesses the patients' gratitude, the more motivated Converse is to continue the tradition. So she has learned to draw upon her friends for help.

"A few months ago, we ran out of prayer shawls on the oncology floor. And we had several end-of-life patients to whom I really wanted to give them," she said. "So I put the word out among my knitting and crocheting friends, and within a couple of days we had a dozen new shawls."

Ruth Rosenfeld of Concord was one recent beneficiary of Converse's handiwork. Although Rosenfeld lost her battle with pancreatic cancer this spring, her youngest daughter, Amy, remembers how meaningful the gesture was to her mother.

"Mom was just so touched," she said shortly after her mother's death. "Typically when I would walk into my mother's hospital room, she would barrage me with questions about practical matters: Have you watered the orchids, is Dad remembering to turn off the coffee pot? But the day Marilyn gave her the prayer shawl, all she wanted to talk about was how beautiful and meaningful it was. . . . It was more than medical care; it was a profound gesture of humanity."

Most of the items that each of the groups make take only a few hours and cost just a few dollars in materials, but, as Converse points out, the women who engage in this activity are not likely to sit down on their own for a few hours straight to engage in a handiwork, which is one reason that the group meetings in Carlisle and Bedford are so popular. Even Lauren Tierney, an eighth-grader, looks forward to the KISS meeting each month.

"I get my homework done just so that I can be here," she said at a recent meeting, holding up a striped scarf to get advice from the other knitters on what the next color should be.

Her mother has visited the Women's Lunch Place in Boston where the knitted items were presented to the women who live at the shelter, so she was able to witness firsthand the value of the efforts.

Once a month, the shelter holds a party for everyone who has a birthday that month. Each birthday celebrant receives handknit slippers or a scarf, as well as a few other small gifts.

"It really means a lot to them," Myers-Tierney said.

Graff said that at Carleton-Willard the activity has significant therapeutic benefits for the group's members, which she estimates to be about 30.

"Some people here have arthritis and knit slowly. Some have trouble with their eyesight. Some with memory problems have trouble just counting the stitches. In this group, we all help each other, and everyone gets something done," she said.

The results? Gifts that warm their creators' hearts as they work together to make them - and then go on to warm the hands, feet, heads, bodies, and hearts of their grateful recipients.

Nancy Shohet West can be reached at nancyswest@msn.com.