Homeless find solace in yarn work

“I’m still working on my blanket,’’ the 46-year-old said, dressed in nightwear and sandals, opening a bag full of colored yarn. “Being stressed, depressed with being homeless on the streets, it helps with your mind.’’

Others call it therapeutic. All agree it has helped create a sense of community.

At the Barbara McInnis House in the South End, where people dealing with homelessness also suffer the pains of medical illnesses, a surprising sort of therapy has brought them together with volunteers in what has become a curative social group. Young and old, men and women, a grandmother and a young pregnant woman all use arts and crafts to ease their minds of struggles ranging from disabilities to kidney disease to drug addiction.

For the Fourth of July, the group decorated flower pots with red, white, and blue streamers. Weeks ago, they used fleece to make blankets and pillows. And every Tuesday night they work with yarn - crocheting and knitting scarves, shawls, and blankets as Christmas gifts and birthday presents, and for their own sense of pride.

They sit in a circle of couches on the second-floor common room of the house, where an artificial Christmas tree gives the spacious room its only color. Bags of yarn overflow from their laps, with some dressed in nightwear and others in jeans, sweat shirts, and knit caps.

They pass Christmas candy back and forth and take pictures of one another. Those who know advanced stitches lean over to teach their friends, one needle over the other, that string over this one. They rarely speak of their ailments, only stopping to say that what they are doing makes them feel better.

The program has benefited not only the residents at McInnis House, a medical facility run by the Boston Healthcare for the Homeless Program, but also the volunteers who bring the yarn and needles and find their own sense of solace interacting with a personality they might not have met before.

“It has to do with getting to know people, and these are great people,’’ said Pauline Edmonds, a nurse and lawyer who works with the state Executive Office of Elderly Affairs. She began volunteering a year ago after donating yarn and needles to the program and learned of the knitting group that had been started by Mary Jo Cappuccilli, a nurse at McInnis.

Edmonds brought a friend, Betsy Youngholm, and the two found the same fulfillment in teaching knitting to people, who in turn teach it to others.

“We knit together, so it seemed like a good match - and we have fun, we love it,’’ said Youngholm, who works with the state Department of Developmental Services. “She roped me in, and I’m hooked.’’

The McInnis House works with some of the most troubled of the homeless. With 104 beds, the program caters to those whose medical needs are too complicated for a typical shelter to handle and too overwhelming to face on their own.

They include people with drug addictions and mental illness that prevented them from knowing they did not have to live on the streets, and also more common ailments that hinder them from being able to own homes.

Kelley, a cheery woman who teases some at the shelter as if she were their big sister, said she has lived in boxes in alleys and in garages and at train stations, and every time she sought refuge at a shelter she has been referred to the McInnis House to address her medical problems, such as aching knees and diabetes. She is also a recovering drug addict.

Debra Rollo, an introspective, street-smart woman who sports a tattoo with the names of her two teenage sons, is undergoing MRI scans and has diabetes. She has relatives who are trying to help her, “but it’s been a bad year. A tough year.’’

Valeria Ann Benton, the elder of the group at 57, says easily that “I like to crochet with my shelter sisters.’’ And Reginna Cobbs, a 35-year-old who is fighting multiple ailments, cannot knit because of neuropathy in her hands, but still she stays with the group to watch what they create, bouncing from one person to the next.

“I used to do it when I was young,’’ she said.

For Denise Alves, who at age 56 has become a surrogate mother to others in the shelter, crocheting has reignited a childhood hobby that she had lost with the challenges of late. When the apartment she lived in was foreclosed upon, she sought refuge with a former boyfriend, and when the housing manager said she could not live there, she went to a shelter, only to be told her medical needs were beyond the facilities’ capabilities.

She has kidney disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure, and at the McInnis House, the nurses keep chasing her down to check her blood levels.

But among the better treatments has been the knitting group, which she found during her first week at McInnis about a month ago, as she walked into the common room and toward the circle of new friends.

She is crocheting an afghan “big enough for a king-size bed,’’ she points out.

She knows how to knit, too, but that’s too demanding. She said she doesn’t have the patience for the double-needle stitch.

“This is comforting,’’ she said.

Milton Valencia can be reached at mvalencia@globe.com.