Knits, Purls, And Silver Awards

Boston’s winters have gotten a little warmer thanks to two Girl Scout cadet's.
Norwood Girl Scouts Elizabeth Begg and Kathleen Keaney have teamed up to earn their Silver Award by collecting and making winter weather gear for area residents who may not have what they need to stay warm during the cold.
“At first my partner and I wanted to make a little library,” says Begg, age 12. But the Girl Scout council has many requirements for the Silver Award, and she and Keaney couldn’t figure out how to make a little library work as a literacy project. “We thought about reading to somebody, but that didn’t make sense.”
And then one day, inspiration blew in on a cold wind. “It was October,” Begg says, “and a breeze came up, and I shivered. I was reminded of all the people that didn’t have a jacket like I always have so I can add an extra layer. So my partner and I thought it out. She wanted to do something with knitting, and I wanted to do something with different generations and warming other people that don’t have the resources that I have to be warm. So we basically weaved those ideas together into a project.”
The Silver Award is the highest award a Girl Scout Cadet can earn, involving a minimum of fifty hours of community service and benefitting the wider community. Because it’s a leadership award, the girls involved in the project must do all the planning and implementation themselves, and they have to find their own sources of funding.
Elizabeth Begg reached out to two kinds of local organizations. Those with members who might need warm clothing, and those who could help provide it.
“I’ve been helping out with the Cradles To Crayons winter drive and had a lot of bags go there,” says Begg, “and the warming center in Brockton.” She has a shipment of men’s clothing ready to go to the Common Ground Resource Center in Framingham. But one of her favorite places to bring clothing was to the Family Shelter in Medway.
“I’ve been able to drop off eight handmade hats and three scarves at the Medway Family Shelter,” she says. That’s in addition to three bags of donated items. “It was really great to be there. It was a very welcome place, and when I showed them the handmade things, I showed each one in turn. They said one of the hats looked like a porcupine, and they thought that was really cool. My mom had made two of them, one rainbow colored and one greenish blue, and they had to laugh because it was really neat and different than what they had expected.”
Begg also got to interact with some of the children who were residents. “Even though they weren’t in a place of their own, I think they’re lucky to be in such a welcoming place.”
On the other side of the equation, Begg has put out donation bins and started knitting groups at the Norwood’s Morrill Memorial Library, Saint Timothy Parish, and Sunrise, a senior living center in Norwood.
The results have been fantastic. “There were over 95 coats donated. Over 179 hats were donated, as well as over a hundred five pairs of mittens and gloves.” And for the hand knits, that’s also been a success. “I have five hats and eight scarves that I have yet to hand out.”
She adds, “I think my back is still sore from loading everything into the car. My mom has filled the trunk of the minivan four times with the seats down.”
The personal touch is important to Begg. Citing the difficulty level, she says, “We’re mostly knitting scarves, but there have been a few hats, one of which has a really cute pom-pom on the top.” Begg adds, “One of the older ladies with actual experience with hats made the pom-pom, and she doesn’t think it fits with the hat, but I think whoever gets the hat will think it’s really cool.”
Begg and Keaney designed their project to benefit everyone, both the participants and the recipients. “Knitters are normally very talkative and enjoy being with each other,” Begg explains, “and so the point of it was that older people and younger people could come together and talk about strategies they have, their lives, what they learned, because there’s so much people can learn from each other.”
For this reason she’s reached out not only to other young knitters but also to the senior center. “People often don’t take the time to notice that other people do lots of things like we do, but they do it a different way, and that’s kind of cool. It’s like a spiders web that you bring everything together to make one big web that turns out beautiful in the end.”
Begg is nearly at the end of her service project, but Keaney is still hard at work, seeking out locations for donation boxes and setting up knitting groups of her own.
Both Begg and Keaney hope their project will continue long after they’ve received their awards. “We could use volunteers to help sort the clothes I collected,” says Begg. And because more winters are bound to come, the knitting groups will keep turning out scarves and hats. “Everybody who’s gone to it absolutely loves it,” says Begg. “Knitting is a good skill to have.”