Volunteer Reinette Michaels leads beading activities

Volunteer Reinette Michaels comes twice a week to lead the gogos in beading activities. She brings along a rainbow multitude of beads, wire forms and other necessary bits. It’s an activity that the gogos can manage while simply sitting outside, as there are precious few tables which get carted from the Home Base Care shack to the gogos in the yard to Milly’s temporary office in the Mission House and back again.

Gogos do a balancing act with craft boxes and beads

The gogos each have a plastic craft box, neatly labeled with their name, to keep track of their tools and unfinished projects. In their boxes I noticed English paper-piecing hexagons partially sewn together, half knitted teddy bears, beaded bangles and hoop earrings. In the photo you can see how some of them use the lid as a mini-table surface.

Joy Burton helps with earrings

Not all have steady enough hands or the sharp eyesight needed for the finicky work of threading beads, but there are a few volunteers and they help each other. I’ve noticed that often there are several gogos who have forgotten their glasses at home (remember our Reading Glasses Blitz almost two years ago that garnered 45 pairs for them?). So today I bought two different styled beaded eyeglass chains and will give them to Reinette as a suggestion for a future project.

Shhhh – a secret: beaded earrings and spiral bracelets are apparently catching a ride in my suitcase as little gifts to their writing partners in Canada . . . with a few extras for others.