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Paula Brink-Heart’s class at Pearl Creek Elementary is providing warmth to children they have never and will never meet.

In Brink-Heart’s fourth year of running the knitting club at the school, she paired her students with adult knitting buddies to create sweaters for Knit for Kids, a charity that distributes sweaters to children in need in the United States and around the world.

“They just stuck with it all year,” Brink-Heart said. “That’s the thing with knitting. You keep doing a couple of rows and soon you have a sweater.”

The 12 sweaters created at Pearl Creek will join more than 400,000 sweaters Knit for Kids has given children during the last 10 years.

The knitting buddies have created striped sweaters of all sizes and colors ranging from bright blue to warm brown and rich purple. Some sweaters have unconventional stripes because the buddies ran out of yarn or simply forgot to add the correct color at the right time, but regardless of their unusual coloring, they still serve to keep the wearer warm.

Throughout the year, students would knit for a week or so before passing their work and materials off to their buddies, who would then add on to the garment, creating a pen-pal-like system strung together with yarn.

To commemorate a school year of yarn and needles, Brink-Heart threw a get-together for her students and their knitting buddies so they could learn more about Knit for Kids and see some of the work the charity is doing.

The event was also an opportunity for Brink-Heart to thank the Pearl Creek Parent Teacher Association for providing the knitting club with a grant used for yarn and needles. It was also a chance to thanks Leah Walker, owner of Inua Wool, who has donated unsold yarn from her store to the knitting club during the last four years.

“I thought somebody should use it,” Walker said.

In the celebration Wednesday, the knitting buddy teams took turns and showed off their colorful garments and shared amusing stories from the creation process.

Although buddies Kevin Kassel and Claudia Hall were still working on their sweater, they said the best part will be seeing the final product. Both Kassel and Hall learned how to knit from Brink-Hart and agree the easiest thing was just regular knitting without purling — a variation of the technique used for knitting.

Knit for Kids was started 10 years ago and collects and distributes crocheted and knitted sweaters from Washington state to Indonesia. All donators use a basic T-shaped design and are not allowed to attach notes or messages to the sweaters — ensuring that all the sweaters will be equal when they are distributed. Despite the restrictions, that didn’t deter the knitting efforts in Brink-Heart’s class.

“I think this is one of the greatest things, and they will always remember it,” Walker said.