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Photo by Bob Pennell Darrylynn Brady works quietly on a blanket while waiting for her car to be serviced, as her son, Tarren Brady, 18 months, entertains himself with new friend Madison Duchi, 3, of Lake Shastina, Calif. Kosovars may feel valley's warmth Needles fly as women make afghans for refugees By MARK FREEMAN WHITE CITY -- The reds and browns and yellows may be ugly, but Darrylynn Brady is sure these cotton yarns will bring welcome warmth to a refugee from war-ravaged Kosovo. Brady, a 27-year-old White City woman, and a dozen sympathetic Rogue Valley housewives like her are crocheting for Kosovo, trying to soothe the Albanian refugees' pains of war with a warm afghan. The women are knitting and crocheting as many of the adult- and infant-sized afghans as possible from donated yarn. They plan to ship the multicolored blankets to European relief efforts as soon as they have an address. Brady knows the 5-by-5-foot afghans crocheted from cast-off yarn may not seem like much when your country is in a shambles and your enemy is executing your neighbors. But Brady and her fellow crocheters simply want to help the refugees, and this is the way they believe they can. "I know most of the organizations say just to send money," says Brady, a mother who works part-time for a shipping company. "Money?" she says. "That's something I don't have. But I like to crochet, and I have a passion to do it. I just want to help." Brady and her sister, Dondi Ford of Ashland, have so far organized about a dozen such wannabe helpers into an afghan club of sorts to help the refugees. They are looking for more knitters and crocheters, as well as people to donate yarn. The Kosovars have taken refuge in places like Macedonia and Albania, having either left Kosovo on their own or been forced out in what NATO says is a Serbian campaign of "ethnic cleansing." NATO forces are bombing the Serbian military in Yugoslavia in an effort to stop the mistreatment of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Watching it unfold on television became too much for D'Ett Long of Gold Hill to take just sitting on her hands. So the 47-year-old grandmother has taken up the crochet hook and her knitting machine and joined Brady's bunch. "I know there's a lot of people homeless in the United States and everywhere, but as a mother and grandmother this is tearing my heart," Long says. "You look at the Albanians, they dress like us, they look like us, they drive cars like us," she says. "This has hit so close to home that I felt I had to do something." That something is creating afghans, the large or small blankets either knitted or crocheted from yarn that Brady is getting donated by the box-load. Members of her loose-knit band work at home alone, meeting from noon to 2 p.m. Wednesdays at a small apartment upstairs of the U-Haul Center in Medford, where the manager is helping the cause as well. Whenever Brady finds a spare moment -- in line at the bank, at home, even while waiting for a repair at a tire store -- she picks up her crochet hook and gets to work. Brady has answered tragedy by crocheting before. She picked up the skill as a 6-year-old, got hooked and stayed with crocheting. In 1992, after Hurricane Andrew slammed into the Hawaiian Islands, she created and shipped off two quilts for disaster victims. This time, she hopes to assemble as many afghans as possible and ship them to Kosovo as soon as she finds a place to send them. Some of the quilts have gaudy shades of yellows, oranges and browns. "Some of these are really atrocious colors," Brady says. "But when you put them all together, they don't look too bad. "And it will keep someone warm." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA