TIMMINS - Rose-Anne Linekar is doing good work with a craft she was told she’d never be able to do.
“Crocheting, I just picked it up about eight years ago,” she said. “My mom taught us all that stuff, and I grew up in the '70s when we didn’t have much and I’d knit my own socks and mitts, but I couldn’t crochet.”
Having been told left-handed people couldn't crochet, she grew up thinking the hobby was out of reach. Until she attended a class.
“But all of a sudden, I put the yarn around one hand, and I put the hook in my left hand, and I was going like I’d been crocheting all my life," she said.
Linekar put that skill to use and has been crocheting poppies to raise money for the Royal Canadian Legion for the past five years and her sister has been doing the same in Sudbury for a decade. It’s become a group effort with friends joining in.
“I thought, you know what? Maybe I should crochet a few hundred and see where that would take me,” she said. “I did it all that year, and I’d get messages saying ‘Can I have 20 poppies and can I pick them up tomorrow’, and there I was.”
She posted in the Timmins, Ont. Facebook page to see if anyone was interested, and the project took off from there.
While the cost of supplies has gone up, she says she’ll keep doing the work as long as she can.
“I’ll do this until the day I die. This is a labour of love for me,” she said. “As I sit there and crochet, I think about my great uncles who gave their lives, and you think of all the people, and with every poppy, I’m thinking about the sacrifices and the people who didn’t come back, and people who did come back, but didn’t come back whole.”
She has crocheted over 2,000 poppies since she started and hopes to make 600 more this year. Last year, she raised $1,200 for both the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 88 in Timmins and Branch 287 in South Porcupine.
“I’ve raised over $6,000 in the last four years, not counting this year,” she said. “
She started using black buttons for the centre of the poppies, but that got tricky during COVID-19. A creative idea got the poppy team through the shortage.
“The inside, black part inside the googly eyes is about the size I need for the little black thing in the middle of the poppy,” she said.
To support Linekar in her work or get a poppy, reach out through her Facebook page. There is no set price for a poppy, it's by donation. She is covering the cost of the materials, with all of the donations going to the legions.
“Everybody has something they can do,” she said. “You just have to find out what that thing is that you can do, and you’ve got to love it as you’re doing it.”
