Manitoba man stitches up funds for food bank with bags made from throwaways

Manitoba Retired Steinbach gym teacher Peter Dick turns trash into treasure, bagging thousands of dollars for the local food bank.(Christopher Gareau/CBC) Peter Dick shows one of his 850 shopping bag creations that help feed people in southeast Manitoba.(Christopher Gareau/CBC) South East Helping Hands executive director and operations manager Ken Dyck points to the warehouse full of food in Steinbach that feeds nearly 400 families every two weeks.(Christopher Gareau/CBC) Craig Skene on Zoom holds up an example of one of the thousands of furniture swatches he has given to Peter Dick to create shopping bags that are sold to benefit the Steinbach food bank.(Christopher Gareau/CBC) Sewer stitches up funds for Steinbach food bank with bags made from throwaways Handbags created from discarded furniture swatches One man has meticulously stitched together over 850 bags to sell in Manitoba and northwestern Ontario, helping feed the 1,700 people who use the Steinbach area food bank. Retired gym teacher Peter Dick uses furniture swatches that would otherwise go to the landfill to make the $5 bags, and 100 per cent of the proceeds go to the food bank. "It gives me joy to give new life to something that has been thrown away by people," Dick said. The sturdy bags can hold four four-litre jugs of milk, with pockets on the inside to store wallets, phones and keys. Dick has also helped other volunteers from Grace Mennonite Church, which he attends, make over 840 quilts to be donated overseas. He stitched leftover material from those to create over 3,000 smaller bags for health and school kits donated all over the world by the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). Dick's former phys-ed student Ken Dyck is now the executive director and operations manager of South East Helping Hands, the Steinbach food bank. When Dyck was still a food bank volunteer and working at Dufresne Furniture in Steinbach, Dick told him he was seeking thick furniture swatches to create patterned bags for the MCC thrift store. Dyck made sure he got old swatches from the store and started selling the bags in Dufresne. The money started going to the food bank, which feeds nearly 400 families every two weeks. "Our community is fantastic. People like this is what keeps us going here," Dyck said. Decor-Rest Furniture sales representative Craig Skene helped Dick step up his charitable hobby six years ago, when Skene was in Steinbach on a work trip. "I'm like, hey, wait a minute. That's my fabric. What's going on? So I grab the bag, and it's really cool," Skene said. He was impressed Dick was using something that was normally thrown out every year to make the high-quality bags. Skene was even more impressed that Dick did not dip into any of the proceeds, even when he bought a new machine for its automatic threader and had it shipped from Vancouver Island, allowing him to bump his output to five bags per day. Now Skene drops off a box of 700 swatches at a time for...

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