Leslie Jewett’s sight is not great – in official terms, she’s legally blind.
Her vision, on the other hand, is perfectly fine.
The Denare Beach-based entrepreneur earns a living making handicrafts and knit and macramé items. The spark for her business came to her more than 25 years ago.
“I have a number of totally blind friends,” said Jewett. “I just came up with it one day. I was knitting and I knitted a cloth and a tea towel, one with stripes that you could feel and one with squares that you could feel, so they could have matching sets in their kitchen.”
Jewett made the towels with raised ridges that could be felt by blind and partially sighted people, and gave them
to friends.
“Their friends told their friends and they told their friends, and it became so popular that I was getting orders left, right and centre,” she said. “So I figured, ‘Hey, why don’t I start a business?’”
Jewett took out a loan, bought a knitting machine and got to work. Today her specialties include items like hammocks, plant holders and the special towels and linens that started everything.
Made mostly out of imported hemp, her items can be found throughout the North, including in her own neighbourhood – she’s made a number of items for the Bayview Manor seniors’ home in Denare Beach.
Limited sight
Jewett was born with perfect vision, but a bout of meningitis robbed her of most of her sight when she was eight years old. She estimates she has about two per cent of her sight.
“I have only peripheral vision,” she said. “If I look straight at you, you’re just a scramble. I kind of have to look off to the side to half-see you.”
Jewett sees enough to look at someone during conversation or walk around the house without issue, but not enough to do things most people take for granted, such as driving a car.
Jewett has never let her lack of sight interfere with her greater vision.
“I don’t feel any different than anyone else until it comes to (certain things),” she said. “I can’t drive. There are things I can’t absolutely do and then it hits me. But otherwise, I don’t consider myself much different than the next person.”
Jewett moved to Denare Beach from Edmonton as a single mother of three in 2006. After putting her business on hiatus, she started up again in earnest two years ago after a resident found out about her skill.
“I made one plant hanger for one person, and he said to me, ‘I want something really different,’” she recalled. “Soon his friends saw, and their friends saw, everybody wanted special hangers.”
Since Jewett jumpstarted her old business, the reception has been positive.
“It’s unbelievable feedback,” she said with a smile. “Their words are better than mine, but they say, ‘This Leslie, she’s amazing! She’s blind and she makes all this stuff!’ They just slurp it up.”
Powerlifter
Before moving to Denare Beach, Jewett spent a decade as a competitive powerlifter. She entered provincial, national and international meets, competing against both partially sighted and non-handicapped competitors.
Not many small-town entrepreneurs can boast about deadlifting 385.5 lbs.
While the bar weighed more three times Jewett’s own body, she was once able to lift that much in competition.
“I’ve broken provincial, national and world records that still stand to this day,” she said, referring to records for sight-impaired female competitors. “If you take your own body weight, triple it and add a little bit, can you lift that much?”
Jewett remembers her days in the gym fondly.
“I think that was the most fun time in my entire life,” she said. “It was like when you take a nice, hot bubble bath and all your troubles just go down the drain. Going to the gym, you leave it at the gym. If you’re stressed, you just work it out in the gym. When you come out of there, you’re less stressed.”
Jewett retired from powerlifting after her son was born in 2001 and rededicated herself to her family and her business.
“When you have a brand new little baby, that’s another full-time job,” she said. “I gave up my powerlifting to raise a baby. Now he’s 16.”
A quarter-century after her business began, Jewitt is still interested in learning new ways to create.
“I would like to get a loom to make my hammocks on,” she said. “I try to use natural products, natural fibres, and I like to work outside on the deck where there’s natural sunlight with as little tools as possible.”
Jewett is also hoping to start another new venture – teaching knitting and macraméing to kids in
Denare Beach in the winter.
“They need things to do, so I’d like to teach them how to macramé and give classes,” she said. “Macramé is such a dying art, and I want to bring it back. I still have my original books from the ’70s. Some of them are barely together.”
