from Owen Sound as told by Beth van Aalst : I just have to share it again with everyone:
” We call ourselves The Bag Ladies and we are located in Owen Sound , Ontario.
We mostly crochet the mats but we do have a few that prefer to weave them. We also have one lady that has tried and was successful knitting one. (I’m not sure if she will do another one lol. she found it very difficult)
We also agreed to help out another group with their completed mats because they had no idea what to do with them. This group only weaves their mats.
The Bag Ladies have also had a Teacher milk bag contest this year with the teachers in the Owen Sound Schools. They registered in September and the students started collecting bags. Each month the bags are dropped off at a assigned location. A running count is kept for each class. The class that collects the most at the end of the school year gets a pizza party, and the winning teacher get a $50 gift certificate from a local tea shop. At the end of this month we are visiting one of those classes and giving them a little “lesson” on the milk bags, The Bag Ladies and what we do, then we are going to teach them how to crochet and weave the mats. We hope some of the students will be interested enough that they continue to make them and maybe join us. We have a grade 8 student outside of Owen Sound that wanted to participate but the pizza place wouldn’t deliver to her school. So she decided to collect anyways. She has collected more than all the teacher’s registered together so far !!!!!! Needless to say The Bag Ladies are getting together and getting her a gift certificate for her. Something for her to get things she needs to start high school with.
The Bag Ladies is also planning a “demo day” in the park. We are setting up a couple tables and signs with some refreshments in one of our busy parks in the summer. Then we are just going to ‘work’ on our mats, cutting, crocheting, weaving and handing out drinks. We are hoping that there might be some interested people come up and ask us about what we are doing and take home with them one of our collection boxes (we provide collection boxes for people to take home and save their bags and when full they exchange full for empty at our collection sites in town) and or our handouts. Hopefully we can get more to come out to our Wednesday nights.
Here is the website, helpinghandscraftclub.weebly.com if you want to check us out”
Bettina