Lisa Wadup has been crocheting for the last 39 years. But recently, she started incorporating different materials into her hobby.
Last year, Wadup started to collect plastic and milk bags.
She then knitted them together, to create mats and pillows for the homeless.
“I volunteer feeding the homeless in the street,” she said. “And they’re always looking for bags, sleeping mats, yoga mats, and things like that. Then on Facebook, I stumbled across a church group that makes these mats with plastic bags. I crochet, it’s free, so away we go.”
Wadup said she’s been crocheting mats and pillows for the last year.
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She says, it takes hundreds of bags to create just one mat.
So, she’s always looking for new material.
To find some, she decided to put out a call on social media, and the community responded.
“People were dropping them off on my front doorstep,” she said. “I went to pick them up. So people just emailed me and said, come get them if you want them, and I do, I go get them.”
Wadup said she spends most of her spare time crocheting these functional works of art.
And once she’s done, she packs up a mat and pillow into a bag, adds a note, and brings it to someone who needs it.
“Homeless people need a place to sleep, they have to have something soft to lie on,” she said.
Wadup sends some of her creations to Dans La Rue, so they can help distribute them.
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But she says, she also loves handing them out herself.
“It’s so little, yet it’s so much for someone like that,” she explained.