Disciple: Crafting Love

How handmade gifts witness to God’s love

By Summerlee Walter

Since 2013, each high school senior who attends St. Margaret’s, Waxhaw, has received a handmade scarf striped with their college, university or military branch’s colors. The scarves are knitted and crocheted by members of the church’s Knots of Love ministry, who stitch prayers and blessings into each row. In an average year, they craft approximately 12 senior scarves. In 2022, however, they stitched 20.

“The gifts of the senior scarves is a tangible gift showing God’s love for our students, and their church’s love for them,” Elizabeth Pfeifer, assistant to the rector for youth ministries and coordinator of the senior scarves project, explained. “These students are rooted in St. Margaret’s and their church family will always be with them in spirit. We hope that when the day(s) come when life is overwhelming, students will pull out their scarf and feel God’s love for them.”

[A handmade card from St. Margaret’s. Photos by Joanie Cameron]

REACHING IN

Scarves aren’t the only gifts the people of St. Margaret’s create for each other. Another group of crafters designs greeting cards and mails handwritten notes to their fellow parishioners. The ministry started as a collaboration between card maker Mary Rushing and executive assistant to the rector Joanie Cameron, who would send Rushing parishioners’ names as she thought of them. Since then, the ministry has expanded with the help of Traci Scott, assistant to the rector for outreach and parish connection, and a team of volunteer card makers. Now, Scott and Cameron send a monthly list of parishioners’ names to the ministry coordinator, who divides the list among the card makers. Each then crafts cards using Stampin’ Up® kits to transform cardstock, stickers and stamps into intricate greeting cards. They then write personal notes and mail out their masterpieces.

Sometimes Scott and Cameron add parishioners to the monthly card list because they are celebrating a milestone or a specific accomplishment. Sometimes they add people who need extra encouragement. They also pull from an alphabetical list of parishioners to send cards simply for the sake of spreading some joy.

“That human connection in a large parish allows us to let others know we are thinking about them and they mean something to us,” Cameron said. “Who doesn’t like to feel that?”

[Clockwise from top left: A snail lovey created for a young survivor of a mass shooting. The 2022 senior class of St. Margaret’s, Waxhaw, wear their scarves in school colors. Crocheted sea creatures from Nativity, Raleigh, formed part of the Fault Lines exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Bella Grace Rhinehardt teaches crochet. A handmade card from St. Margaret’s. Photos by Joanie Cameron (St. Margaret’s), Allison Rhinehardt (St. Mark’s) and Ailsa Tessier (Nativity)]

REACHING OUT

Members of the Chatty Yarns group at Church of the Nativity, Raleigh, also spread joy through their art. The knitting and crocheting group began approximately 12 years ago with fiber artists creating items to donate throughout the community, including lots of hats for newborns at area hospitals. Over time, the group began making items to sell during the church’s annual Day of Giving, an alternate gift event during which outreach programs ask shoppers to make donations in honor of friends and family members in lieu of buying Christmas gifts. The Chatty Yarns typically raise $1,000 or more to donate to an organization the group designates, like Inter-Faith Food Shuttle or YMCA camp through Leesville Road Elementary School. The group has also donated lap blankets to people in hospice, as well as fulfilled occasional special requests, such as warm scarves for a member’s friend who has Alzheimer’s disease. They have sent boxes of warm hats, mittens and scarves to clothing closets up north, where one member had a connection. One year, the group even performed a choreographed routine using knitting needles during the church talent show.

Recently, the Chatty Yarns participated in the Fault Lines exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art. As part of a community project facilitated by Christine and Margaret Worthheim, crafters from Nativity created coral and other crocheted sea creatures to add to a Great Barrier Reef made from yarn. More than 400 people from across the state contributed to the massive reef that greeted visitors at the entrance to the exhibit.

A new group at St. Mark’s, Huntersville, is reaching out in a different way. After the recent mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Bella Grace Rhinehardt embraced pastoral care chair Jan Daubener’s suggestion to start crocheting small loveys for young survivors of mass shootings. In addition to the church’s established prayer shawl and baby blanket ministry, a group of new knitters and crocheters volunteered to learn the crafts from Rhinehardt so they could create a small stash of stuffed animals before the next mass shooting.

“We bought supplies on Sunday [July 3]...soft, chenille yarn, hooks, needles. Who knew the very next day another mass shooting would happen?” Allison Rhinehardt, Bella Grace’s mother, said. “And now, Bella Grace is quietly crocheting a soft little snail to send to a 2-year-old baby whose parents were killed while watching a parade in honor of our country’s independence.” The Rev. Garry Edwards, rector of St. Mark’s, blessed the blue and white snail, which went to a child who lost both parents in the Highland Park shooting.

The vicissitudes of life—enormous and shocking or small and private—will not be rectified entirely by a handmade gift, but each stitch and stamp, each purl and handwritten line, serves as a reminder of its maker’s loving care, reflecting God’s loving care for each of us, his own creation.

Summerlee Walter is the communications coordinator for the Diocese of North Carolina.