Sharing Warmth: Interlachen resident knits to help those who are suffering.
By Bailey Pickens
Warmth is a personal quality, meaning kindness and a knack for making others feel cared for. It also refers to a pleasant temperature that offsets the cold. The Warming Families organization is seeking to combine both meanings in one ministry. It was begun in 1999 by Beverly Qualheim as part of the One Heart Foundation "umbrella" organization. The group seeks to strengthen families in various ways.
Warming Families connects people who knit, sew, and crochet with local community outreach programs —- homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, nursing homes and similar organizations. They make phone calls to local volunteers and provide logistical support over wide areas. Area volunteers also act locally, collecting homemade blankets, lap robes, hats, scarves, and similar “warming items” and transporting them to shelters and homes.
Warming Families items always go directly to those who benefit from the services — they may not be sold. Since 1999, Warming Families has donated more than 100,000 warming items.
Kaye Rogers, who recently moved from Keystone Heights to Interlachen, joined Warming Families as an area volunteer in Florida in 1999 when she discovered the organization’s Web site (www.warmingfamilies.com) while looking for new crocheting patterns. Since then she has crafted over 2,500 items, including more than 100 hats for cancer patients at the Gainesville Veterans Administration hospital.
She has also led the organization since 2004, overseeing area volunteers in the United States and Canada, doing phone work over North America to find new outlets for donation and register new donors and volunteer workers.
She has even retained her post as Florida’s area volunteer, arranging donation pickups as far from home as Miami, as well as driving around the area collecting items to donate. She personally picks up donations of yarn as well as fully-made crafts from those who get in touch with her. She scours thrift stores and yard sales for cheap yarn to supply her own projects. Every little bit helps, she says, but one donation sticks out in her mind. A woman in South Florida called to say she had found some yarn in her mother’s house that she would donate, as Rogers did “good works,” if she came and got it. Come Rogers did, driving her truck to the home. “I ended up with a whole truckload” of yarn, she said, laughing.
In addition to Warming Families, Rogers also is involved with two other organizations: Soldiers’ Angels, which sends letters written at home to military personnel overseas, and Toasty Toes, which sends soldiers handmade slippers, hats and headbands. But Warming Families is especially close to her. “I had to use the services of a domestic violence shelter, and I was also homeless at one time,” she said. “I have seen a lot (of women) go in with nothing but the clothes on their backs, thinking that no one cares about them — if he’s like that, then everyone must be.”
Warming Families, she hopes, will show those women that there is someone out there who cares about them. Even receiving something as simple as a blanket can make an impression, when that blanket was made by someone so that it could be given away. Being given a handmade blanket “means there are still caring people in the world,” Rogers said, because someone had to care in order to make the blanket in the first place.
