12-year-old girl from South Hills uses sewing skills to comfort others
A 12-year-old from the South Hills is using her sewing skills to help comfort young people.
Cassie Garrod, of Upper St. Clair, says she's loved teddy bears since she was really young and believes in what they can do.
"They can give you comfort and make you feel better," Garrod said.
Garrod wanted to share that sentiment with others and needed community service hours for a school project.
"I wanted to know what I could do with the skills that I had to help people," Garrod said.
She settled on teddy bears, but the process took almost a year to make more than 20 stuffed animals.
"We had to first sew all the corners of the bears," Garrod said.
Accessories like the hearts came next, along with embroidering the faces and sewing those accessories, which was not easy.
"Some of the accessories got kind of frustrating, poking yourself 20 times," Garrod said.
But she got them done and decided to donate them to Tri-Community South EMS, which serves Bethel Park, South Park, and Upper St. Clair.
"We didn't really know what to expect," Tri-Community South EMS Chief Keith Morse said.
Morse said Gerrod made the first call to them to express interest in donating.
"She came in with this giant box of about 25 bears that were handmade with such detail," he said.
The detail is not an embellishment. The teddy bears have names, personality traits and other features.
The goal is simple: to help comfort kids in what could be some of the scariest moments of their lives.
"A lot of times they don't understand what we're doing, what's happening. They've never been in an ambulance before," Morse said.
Morse said the teddy bears really can make them feel more at ease, which allows his staff to do their jobs better.
"We can assess them and treat them and, in a much better manner, when we have them calm," he said.
Garrod says every single one of them being unique helps with getting kids to that point.
"We just wanted kids to feel like they really got something special," Garrod said. "We want them to feel like they're really being thought about."
Morse says two bears will be in each ambulance at Tri-Community South EMS, and there will be some left over, too.
Meanwhile, Garrod is already working on a second batch for the Ronald McDonald House. Regardless of all the labor it's taken, she still thinks it's worth it.
"I just thought that was a really cute idea for kids to know that we really do care," Garrod said.
Garrod has also made a website where people can share their stories about what the teddy bears and other stuffed animals have meant to them.