Jim Taylor's Columns - 'Soft Edges' and 'Sharp Edges'

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8

May

2020

Stay home, keep calm, knit comfort

Author: Jim Taylor

During my wife’s last calendar year of life, she knitted a prayer shawl a month. 

            You may not be familiar with prayer shawls. Some are square; some triangular. Joan’s tended to be about five feet long and two feet wide, knitted with the warmest and softest wool she could buy. (The wool shop was always glad to see her!)

            In the days when we could still gather for worship services, our congregation periodically held a blessing of prayer shawls. Every person either laid a hand directly on a shawl, or on someone connected to a shawl.

            People have different understandings  of the efficacy of prayer. 

            Regardless, I have no doubt that those shawls carried with them a sense of warmth and comfort to people who needed both. 


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10

May

2017

Old technologies, modern markets

Author: Jim Taylor

Change does not depend on modern technology. There’s nothing modern about knitting needles – two sticks, essentially. But knitting needles lifted 45 families in Bolivia out of abject poverty.

            When the rich tin mines in Bolivia closed, in the late 1980s, miners simply left in search of new jobs, abandoning their wives and children. Many of these women ended up on the streets of the city of Cochabamba. All through the Andes, women knit soft alpaca wool into sweaters and shawls.

            These women had knitting skills. But no markets.

            Enter a Canadian connection. Volunteers brought some of their beautiful hand-knit garments to Canada. Where Beverley Edwards-Sawatzky saw them. By organizing annual sales -- in Edmonton, Calgary, Cranbrook, and now here in Lake Country – she has been able to funnel close to $1 million to the women of the Minkha cooperative.

            This is the global economy at work.


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13

Jul

2016

The silent ministry of knitting

Author: Jim Taylor
A few years ago, my wife Joan took up her ministry. She knits prayer shawls.
With the onset of chronic leukemia, Joan didn’t have the energy to continue some of her previous volunteer activities. She hadn’t done much knitting for years. But shortly after her diagnosis, her friend Bev Milton knitted Joan a blue prayer shawl.
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Categories: Soft Edges

Tags: ministry, knitting

1

May

2016

Cooperative effort benefits three continents

Author: Jim Taylor
Compassion can bring continents closer together. I’ve written before about Bev Edwards-Sawatzky, the Oyama woman who took 45 poverty-stricken Bolivian women under her wing. Fifteen years ago, when Edwards-Sawatzky saw a display of sweaters knitted by the Minkha Co-operative in Bolivia, she knew she had to get involved. The next year, she flew to Bolivia, the poorest nation in South America, to get to know the knitters and their story personally. Until the late 1980s, the women had lived in Oruro; their men worked in the world’s richest tin mines. Then world tin markets crashed. The mines closed. In that machismo culture, the men abandoned their wives and children and left in search of new jobs. Relocated to Cochabamba, lacking education, employable skills, and incomes, the women eked out an existence on the streets. The only skill they had was knitting.
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