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Burnaby mom knitting for RCH's neonatal intensive care unit

Profile: Aruna Neela Occupation: Knitter/philanthropist Why is she in the news? Burnaby mom Aruna Neela has combined her love of knitting with philanthropy to help the tiniest, most vulnerable of humans: the premature babies at Royal Columbian’s neon

Profile: Aruna Neela

Occupation: Knitter/philanthropist

Why is she in the news?

Burnaby mom Aruna Neela has combined her love of knitting with philanthropy to help the tiniest, most vulnerable of humans: the premature babies at Royal Columbian’s neonatal intensive care unit. Neela runs Haberdash Couture, a small business selling knitting patterns, and she’s started a campaign where kids and community members knit tiny blankets for sick and premature babies at Royal Columbian Hospital. Neela’s passion for helping others is spreading like wildfire. She’s already amassed 50 to 60 blankets, no bigger than a sheet of paper. She’s has also started “mini-elective” classes in local schools, where kids learn how to knit. Contributors to the blanket project include students from Burnaby’s John Knox Elementary and Urban Academy in New Westminster, the Knit2gether group at Tommy Douglas library, Neela’s friends and random strangers who’ve heard about the project through the knitting community. One woman even sent blankets from as far as Kamloops. Neela plans to take the John Knox knitting students to Royal Columbian on Tuesday to deliver the blankets. When babies are born and admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit, Royal Columbian gives the tiny “snug” blankets to their moms, who are instructed to sleep with them, so their scent rubs off on the blankets. The scented blanket then goes back to the baby and helps create a bond with the mother.

Q&A:

Tell me a bit about your knitting project.

This is the very first Haberdash Couture Kids knitting project for charity, where we are knitting for humanity, friendship and fun. We are knitting baby blankets for premature babies at the Royal Columbian Hospital.  I asked one of the nurses there to give me an idea of how tiny the babies are, and she said the tiniest one they had was the length of a pencil and weighed (the same as) a square of butter. And when I asked what dimension she needed, ... the basic size was a sheet of paper, eight-and-a-half by 11. That absolutely blew me away, but is showed me this is a fabulous first project for children and their families, because a small child could knit something the size of a paper.

 

Why did you want to do this?

Combining art for humanity has been something that has been in me since I was a little girl, and I knew I wanted to use my art to help this Earth.

 

What do you hope the children learn or take away from this project?

I want them to know that just because you’re little, doesn’t mean you can’t make a big impact. That’s number 1. One of the school’s - Urban Academy - the children there are seven and eight years old, that’s really young, and they’re able to make a change.

 

What do you get out of the project?

To tell you the truth, I just get excited when people create, and I get especially excited when children get excited about something they’ve created, just coming back to helping humanity.

 

Can you give me an example of how the kids were getting excited about this project?

The little kids who are at Urban Academy who are in Grade 2 and 3 that were knitting, their questions were mainly on the babies. And they were just saying, “I can’t believe I am knitting this for a tiny baby, and how tiny are they? A pencil?!” And they would look for a pencil, and they are looking at it and they just couldn’t believe that’s how tiny the baby is. So the whole imagery, it was all about the babies, they were bubbling.

 

What do you think appeals to children about helping little babies?

Who doesn’t love babies, from children to senior citizens? A baby is a baby, and it represents new life, and they are cute, they’re adorable. But when you hear about a sick baby, your heart breaks. It’s like the two opposites. When you picture a baby, you picture a happy, healthy baby. Then when you hear there are some babies that aren’t healthy right away, I think one of the students I taught at John Knox was a premature baby, too, so it was especially important to her. And this was an opportunity for her to give back to where she came from, a little incubator in a hospital. When your image of that happy healthy laughing baby is shattered and you hear they need special care to live, then that really pulls on your heartstrings.

 

For more information, go to www.hckids.weebly.com. To get involved in the knitting project, or to have Neela teach kids how to knit, email hckidsmailbag@gmail.com.