Vancouver Island senior gives back by knitting hundreds of hedgehogs to help others
CTV
To appreciate why Norah Macey's been knitting hundreds of hedgehogs, we need to go back to the day she was unexpectedly compelled to buy a book about knitting socks.
“I hadn’t knitted in 25 years,” the senior recalls with a laugh. “I thought, ‘I guess I’ll knit socks!’”
Although the first socks she made were so big her husband ended up using them as slippers, Norah was undeterred.
“I knitted like a banshee,” Norah smiles. “I knitted morning, noon, and night.”
She knitted countless cozy items for her family and friends, before knitting for strangers that she noticed cycling in her neighbourhood.
“I’d see people with cold ears,” Norah says, showing CTV News knitting that fits under a bike helmet. “I would say, ‘Here, have these ear-warmers.’”
When the cyclists would inevitably offered to pay, Norah would invariably decline to accept — which her younger self would never have imagined.
“There was a time in my life when I could have used a couple dollars to buy a loaf of bread for my kids,” Norah says.
Norah says she originally stopped knitting around the time she started raising her children in poverty.
