‘We come in and we sit and schmooze.’

The women of the floating knitting klatch at a small yarn shop in Sherman Oaks are working hard these days to make winter caps and scarfs for the homeless men of the Union Rescue Mission.

This modest bit of charity is the idea of Marilyn Alter, owner of the Knot Garden, where the women gather in a small Ventura Boulevard shopping center.

Knowing that all knitters have leftovers after finishing a project, Alter sent letters to her customers asking them to use their scrap yarn to make garments for the homeless.

And she drafted the women of the knitting klatch.

They were there Wednesday, sitting around a table at the front knitting, when Mark Holthaus, of the Rescue Mission, showed up to tell the news media how much the garments are needed on the streets of Los Angeles.

Of course they would have been there anyway. It’s what they do.

The women, who among them represent a considerable slice of human experience, got right to the point about why they come to the store to knit.

“We come in and we sit and schmooze,” said Agnes Lacy, a small woman in a peach coat.

For the next hour, they did just that.

Knitting talk drifted in and out of their conversation.

“Oh, you did the garter stitch!” Leah Cohen, a plum coat draped over her shoulders, exclaimed, inspecting the work of a neighbor.

“You’re going to put a pompon on, aren’t you?” one of the women asked Lacy when she displayed red and black caps.

In between such technical chatter, the women spritzed from subject to subject, talking about husbands, language, charity and their childhoods.

“Can I tell you what this reminds me of--you’re too young?” Cohen asked, addressing me. “World War II.”

“Oh, we were patriotic,” Janice Hill, in a bright flowered print blouse, said from across the table. She said she had been in knitting klatches then, making clothing for the men at the front.

“My father was the kind of guy that cared for everybody,” Cohen said.

During the Depression, when she was a little girl, her father took one of her three blankets to share with the needy, she said.

“My father said, ‘We have enough. Let’s share it with somebody else in the community.’ And he was right,” Cohen said.

Cohen looked over her shoulder at Goldie Knapp, the youngest woman at the table, in blue jeans and a blue sweater. She was knitting with thick strands of wool on large needles, moving swiftly from row to row.

“Why, she started me with 98 stitches and one wool . . . “ Cohen said, feigning distress at her own slow progress.

It came out, inevitably, that all of the women were migrants, though some had made the move to the Valley more than 50 years ago.

Lacy was from New York. Cohen was from Canada. Knapp and Hill were from Texas. So was Rubye Goldberg, who is also Alter’s mother. She had just moved West to be near her daughter and was doing only her second piece of knitting.

She said she came from a town that was famous for its fruitcake.

“I’ve lived all my life in Texas and I wouldn’t eat the fruitcake,” she said. “Then I came out here, and one of my friends sent me a fruitcake and I didn’t know what to do with it.”

The women’s gaiety began to interfere with ABC reporter Cynthia Allison, who was interviewing Holthaus on camera.

“Girls, girls!” Allison shushed. “What is this, a coffee klatch?”

They quieted but continued to schmooze.

Hill told a story about hearing voices coming from an oleander bush one day while driving a girlfriend home.

She said she told her friend, “There are voices coming out of that bush.

“She says, ‘I’ve been living here 20 years, and there’s never been voices coming out of that bush,’ ” Knapp said. “I pulled over onto the shoulder. There were four men in there and they had cardboard and little rugs. Then she told me they stayed six months in that bush.”

Lacy had to leave early. She was having eye surgery in the morning.

“Good luck, love,” Cohen said. “We’ll be thinking of you.”

The rest worked on and talked on.

“Would you believe I moved into the first housing tract in 1946?” Hill said. It was in Sylmar.

“They built 20 houses, and they rushed ours up and got us in first, $250 down, $46 a month, three-bedroom, hardwood floor.”

Eventually, Holthaus left carrying a shopping bag full of caps and scarfs.

“You know that my mother used to take me down there when I was a tiny girl.” Hill told Holthaus as he said goodby.

She said it was in the 1920s and her mother drove a Model-T over Cahuenga Pass, then called Dark Canyon.

“My mother was a home missionary for our church,” she said.

Feeling the pressure of a deadline, I left soon after Holthaus.

The women stayed, answering to a different sort of pressure.

“Hey, Jan,” Alter shouted, looking at the empty shelf, cleared of the finished garments.

“You girls have to really get your little fingers busy.”