You would have seen kids playing with soft toys all day around refusing to part with them. But have you seen a kid hunching over a sewing machine all day long because he wants to make soft toys for sick kids?
12-year-old Campbell Remess crafts stuffed toy animals so that he can gift them to sick in the hospital.
According to a report in Today, in the past three years Campbell has crafted 800 toys and personally delivered them to sick children in the local hospital.
“He’s just not a normal kid. Not every 12 year old would want to do that,” said his mother, Sonya Whittaker.
For Sonya who lives in Hobart, Australia parenting Remess is an incredible joy. Even when she asks him to do other things, Campbell returns to the sewing machine to do what he loves most.
“I literally shake with emotion — it’s an incredible thing to witness,” Whittaker told TODAY via email. “One small idea, one small gesture can make huge impacts.”
When Campbell was nine he wanted to bring hope to sick children and asked his parents if he can buy them gifts.
Campbell is one of nine children and his parents had hard time buying stuff for all their children, so they said a ‘no’.
“When they told me it would cost too much I decided to make them,” he shared on his facebook page.
Sonya thought he would gift some drawings or paintings but he had another idea. On the internet, Campbell had found a pattern for making a soft toy and he wanted to try making one. Sonya struggled understanding it but he figured it out well.
“I had a pattern and wanted to make it and I knew I could do it if I practiced,” he said via email to Today. “Mum told me ‘Just don’t sew your finger,’ but I’ve done that a few times and once all the way through.”
Since then it has been persistent hard work and practice at work for Remess. It took him five hours to make his first toy – a stuffed bear.
“I was blown away by the first bear,” said Sonya. “Overly impressed and totally in awe but not surprised at his persistence to teach himself.”
By the time, Remess had made his fourth bear he had turned confident and then he decided he would make a bear a day and he called his project ‘Project 365 by Campbell‘ – Changing the world one bear at a time.
“I decided that I would make 1 present a day which is 365 a year and give them all away,” Campbell shared on his facebook page.
Watch Campbell on Feed SBS video here:
