By: Jake Gibbons, Lion’s Eye Staff Writer, jmg6173@psu.edu

A new year calls for a lot of new changes, and 2015 is no different.

For this year’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Week of Service, the Made with Love project aimed to provide service to others in a different kind of way.  A project which enabled students to make blankets from scratch for donation to a local nursing home took place January 20.

On that morning, a small group of students gathered around separate tables. Two sheets of warm cloth were required to make the blankets, each piece needing to be individually cut, folded and tied together to form a single piece. Inspiration for the project came from Nittany Needle Work, a sewing club that was offered a few years ago at Brandywine that embarked on a similar pursuit. Just as before, the blankets would be donated after being made to the Fair Acres nursing home located just up the road from Brandywine to be used as lap blankets for those in wheelchairs.

“Each person is given a handmade blanket when they enter the home,” Amy Dealy, Brandywine’s programming coordinator for student affairs and leader of the project, said. “So when we offered to make some for them they loved the idea immediately.”

The turnout for the event was relatively small, but a fair number of blankets were still made over the course of the event. After the blankets were made, free pizza was given to those who helped out, which actually encouraged a few other students in the Den to help as well.  Sushrut S., a freshman at Brandywine and prospective computer science major, was one of the students participating.

“It’s for a good cause and it seems like a good use of common hour,” Sushrut said. “That, and there’s free pizza.”

Dealy was satisfied with the event, and will be planning more events similar to this one for upcoming service weeks or just as a general event. She hopes that if they do this sort of event again that she’ll be able to gather more people and in turn make more blankets to donate. This time about eight were made in total, with more to be made later on.