Heartwarmers: Growing group crafts with care and love

In 2013, Heartwarmers began as a group of six women making fleece blankets for the children cared for at the KIDS Center in Bend.

The founder of Heartwarmers, Mary Tomjack said recently, “I had a friend in Atlanta, Georgia that sent me one of these blankets like we are making. She said they made them at their church for the homeless. I thought, ‘Well, I can do that.’

Volunteer Joyce Miles said, “Mary started telling me about she was going to have a special something to do, and it was going to be making these blankets. I said, ‘Well that sounds like a good thing to do.'”

The group was offered a space to assemble the blankets at the Deschutes Children’s Foundation, free of charge.

“In the meantime,” Tomjack said, “I had friends in Sisters that wanted to do this also. We started at the library there, and then in Redmond we started at the Senior Center. We are now a family of 200 volunteers.”

Heartwarmers is now a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization fully supported by donations.

“We do not fundraise,” Tomjack said. “We’ve been very fortunate with donors who have helped us and grant writing.”

The project list also has expanded to more than tied fleece blankets.

Miles said, “I called Mary and I said, ‘Would you have any use for bears?’ And she said, ‘Oh yes, I think we could put them with our blankets and use probably 30.’

Another volunteer, Frances Duffy ,crochets little baby hats. “I was making larger hats. When I found room for the smaller ones, then I decided to make them.”

The group also has a no-waste policy

Volunteer Judi Scharf uses the extra fleece “I crochet around the edges, and they are given as lap blankets or baby blankets.”

With the scraps, they also make fleece scarves, hats and hand grips for stroke patients.

Tomjack said the also found a use for the salvage: “We braid into knot our salvages into pet toys. We give to three nonprofits who work with our animals.”

The group now meets six times a month, twice in Bend, Sisters and Redmond, with volunteers of all kinds.

Emily Pisani, 12, also volunteers. “Mary and some of her friends visited my Girl Scout troop three years ago, and then I got interested and started coming,” she said.

Tomjack said, “We have three or four men that often are here with us. We have husbands and wives. We have sisters. We have twins. We have mother-daughters. In Redmond, we actually have a stroke patient who comes with her caregiver.”

Heartwarmers currently makes items for 30 organizations from all across Central Oregon.

“It’s cancer patients. It’s children at risk. It’s teens off the street. It’s people in hospice. There’s a whole list, and we cover them all,” Tomjack said.

To learn more: https://heartwarmersco.org/