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Helping Virginia Tech Heal

June 17, 2007

By Rex Bowman

BLACKSBURG, Va. — "Saw the blog, had to come."

BlanketThat's how Cindi Pettigrew of Midlothian explained why she and knitters from around the state descended on Blacksburg yesterday to stitch together 32 blankets for families of the victims of April's campus massacre.

Pettigrew joined nearly 100 others who heeded Gina Bonomo's call to action and spent the day making Hokie Healing Blankets. Bonomo, owner of the Mosaic Yarn Shop in Blacksburg, used her knitting blog to urge people to knit the blankets for the shooting victims' families, and word of mouth, computer chat rooms and news accounts got knitting needles and crochet hooks busily moving worldwide.

Bonomo's store received 6,000 knitted and crocheted squares of yarn — more than three times what it needed — from all 50 states and countries around the globe, and yesterday knitters sat around large tables or on the floor of a carpeted room at the Inn at Virginia Tech and sewed the mostly orange and maroon squares together to create the blankets.

The volunteer knitters came from Richmond, Lynchburg, Harrisonburg, Lexington, Roanoke, Blacksburg and small towns throughout the state. One woman drove from North Carolina.

Among those sewing the squares together was Mary Larson of Richmond, who came to Tech with her sister, Anne Buzzy of Lynchburg. Larson said she belongs to a knitting group that made many squares for the blankets.

"When we heard the number of squares they were receiving," Larson said, "we knew they were going to need help." So off to Tech she went.

The volunteers began arriving at the Inn at 10 a.m. and wasted no time in organizing groups to sew the 8-by-8-inch squares together into blankets of 64 squares. In 10 minutes, half a dozen groups were racing to finish the 32 blankets by 5 p.m. Larson and Buzzy were in the group of eight women that finished the first blanket. The other women — there were no men — stopped just long enough to applaud them.

"When we got done with it, we got to pray over it for the family," Buzzy said. "And that meant a lot to us."

The enterprise began around 8 a.m., when Bonomo and her six employees met at the yarn shop and loaded 32 plastic bags into their cars. They'd divided the squares the previous day, making sure each bag contained enough squares for one blanket, including a square with a "VT " and a Hokie bird. They hauled the bags to Tech.

"When I was unloading the bags, that's when I realized each one of the bags represented a life, and I started crying," said store employee Debbie Brame of Claytor Lake, who has two children attending Tech.

Bonomo said the original plan was to display the completed blankets — volunteers must still crochet edging onto them — at Tech for a week before delivering them to the families. Now, she said, she isn't sure they'll be put on display because many of the knitters want the families to receive them as soon as possible.

Store employee Belinda Ierardi said there's been another change of plans. They had initially proposed making the 32 blankets for families of each of the shooting victims, but because they received so many squares, they now hope to make blankets for the two dozen injured and wounded as well.

Contact Rex Bowman at rbowman@timesdispatch.com or (540) 344-3612.