A Feel Good Friday surprise for a former ballerina whose middle name should have been ‘Charity’

EastIdahoNews.com and Ashley HomeStore in Idaho Falls and Pocatello are teaming up every week to bring you some good news during Feel Good Friday!

We want to thank people in our community with random acts of kindness and leave you feeling good.

We recently received a message about a woman named Patti. It said:

I would like to tell you about my neighbor Patti. I think her name is Patricia Kaye, but her middle name should have been Charity.

I met her years ago when she would come home to see her mother…Patti lived in New York and, when she was young, was a ballerina and then ran a knitting shop. During one visit to her mother in Idaho, my friend and I told her about the humanitarian project that was going on in our church. We were making leper bandages. Patti said that she could knit some on her trip home.

When she got to New York, she saw her roll ends of fabric that were suitable for the bandages and decided to try to program the machine to make them. She ended up making 500 bandages.

After her mother’s death, she moved from New York to Parker, Idaho. My friend and I wondered how she would adjust living in a big city to a little town in Idaho. Our fears were unfounded. She went to the homemaking meetings and soon took up with all of the humanitarian projects. People would drop off their scrap fabric and she would piece quilt tops then tie the quilts that would be donated to the welfare office. She never let a list pass her by without signing up to volunteer for whatever was being asked to do.

In 2005, she got employment at BYU-Idaho to teach ballet. She turns 80 in April!

She joined the local quilt guild and continued making quilts for various causes. She joined the Lady Lions and they made a quilt for each of the older veterans in the area. They were paying to have the quilts quilted on a machine, so she decided she would try to locate a used quilting machine so that she could quilt all the quilts and they wouldn’t have to pay to have that done.

She is a wonderful lady deserving of a surprise!

We knew we had to do something for Patti and when we told her friends about our Feel Good Friday surprise, they chipped in their money to make it an extra special visit! Watch the video above to see how it turned out.