Crochet For Charity: Australian teen, 13, learns crochet online, spends holidays making toys for hospitalised children

While most 13-year-olds spend holidays sleeping and hanging out with friends, Sophie Histed has other plans. The Hillcrest teenager spends her time crocheting kindness, a skill she taught herself. Her holidays are packed. She works tirelessly on a production line for handmade plushies, which she sends to the paediatric ward at Calvary North Adelaide Hospital. As a teen, Sophie understands how daunting it can be for children in hospital. So she hopes to weave joy with her crocheted toys.She has donated 30 handmade plushies to the hospital during this holiday. Each took her about an hour to stitch into a cuddly form. And guess what? They are absolutely cute, something that is guaranteed to bring a smile to any child’s face.

Learning crochet online

Sophie wasn’t born to crochet. She didn’t take any classes either. There were no instructors. It was more like trial and error. She started with knitting and picked up crochet through YouTube tutorials. After getting herself a beginner’s kit, she started practising. It took her about four years to master this skill. And before long, she knew she wanted to put her hobby to good use. That’s how she started to crochet kindness, in the form of plushies, of course.

Plushies for kids

The crocheted plushies looked absolutely stunning. They would cheer up any child. And she knew who needed it most: the children in the paediatric ward. “I just wanted to make people happy and wanted to do something with what I had made, and what better way than giving them to a hospital,” Sophie told The Advertiser.Here’s where the story gets interesting. Rather than deciding herself which patients should receive her creations, Sophie left that to the staff. She understood that nurses and hospital workers see the cases that matter most, and who better than them to know what each child wished for.“We wanted to leave it up to the hospital staff because they would know who needs them most and the right patients to give them to,” the teen said.The hospital staff recognised the gesture. Managers interrupted meetings to pause over the collection before distribution began. The crocheted plushies were really good, even grown-ups thought they were cute. “The hospital staff we met all loved them. There were a few hospital managers going into a meeting and they stopped for a moment, looking at them; they thought they were great,” Sophie recalled.Among the thirty toys she made, her favourite has to be a cat dressed in an apple suit. And the bright yellow dinosaur also has her heart. Now that these plushies have brought pure joy to the children, she is already thinking ahead. This won’t be a one-time effort. The question isn’t whether she’ll do this again, but how soon.“It was really fun, and I would like to do this again,” she said.At a time when most people volunteer to build a résumé, Sophie is doing something different. She found a skill she already had and directed it towards people who needed it. Her kindness comes straight from the heart, something the world needs more of.