Emerald Oaks Mats Mission | Resort Lifestyle Communities

This 12 months, resident Lorraine of Emerald Oaks in San Antonio and Kelly Alonzo, the  neighborhood’s Lifestyle Director, have labored to remodel over 17,000 discarded plastic luggage into mats utilizing crochet needles. The neighborhood donates the mats to Church Under the Bridge, a church in close by Waco, Texas, that distributes them to the homeless women and men it serves to make use of as sleep mats.

Lorraine: What impressed us to start out this challenge was that we needed to do one thing for the bigger neighborhood. I’d made little blankets for preemie infants earlier than, however then one of many different residents right here had beforehand made mats like this for her church in Oklahoma City. She acquired sick and needed to step again so Kelly put me in cost.

Kelly: For months, she’s been working around the clock making them. They’ve been such a labor of affection. Lorraine has been the one crocheting them with an enormous crochet needle however volunteers have come to the neighborhood to discover ways to flatten and minimize the plastic luggage so that they’re able to be crocheted.

Lorraine: My helpers make the “flarn,” which is plastic yarn. You have to chop off the ends of the bag and minimize them into strips two and half inches lengthy. Then you tie these strips collectively to make the flarn.

Kelly: Lorraine and her husband Jim have been engaged on them for therefore lengthy now. They’re like art work, like an exquisite blanket.

Lorraine: I realized the best way to make them on YouTube. I actually wish to crochet, and I wish to really feel like I’m doing one thing helpful for someone else.

Kelly: So many residents helped by donating luggage. Even our native Boy Scouts troops have been donating. It was an effort on the a part of many!

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