When Patricia Ross and Brenda Thompson get together they’ll have you in stitches with jokes and crocheting.You see, the two women are the supreme creators of  lap-sized afghans, hats and scarves.They make them for  clients with dementia at the non-profit  Rocky Mountain Program of  All-inclusive Care for the Elderly, or PACE.The two women are PACE clients and live idependently. PACE  has a large variety of programs  to help seniors live in their own homes. About 14 percent of participants reside in nursing homes, officials said.Ross, 71, and Thompson, 65, live in the same apartment complex, but come to the PACE Center where there is a medical clinic, vision care, physical therapy, social services, transportation, adult day care, nutrition services, and social activities.Their lap robe project was hatched after Ross had heart surgery.“I was bored, bored, bored,” Ross said. Thompson had some yarn and the rest is history. They crochet  six hours a day five days a week, mostly at their apartments, sometimes at social gatherings at the PACE Center. At last count, they have made 48, of the blankets and scores of  scarves and hats.The blankets are available for clients being bused to the center in the winter. Some are used in wheelchairs. On the dementia day care unit, clients often carry baby dolls for comfort, and they wrap them in the blankets that Ross and Thompson make. The crocheted items are also given as bingo prizes, and to area nursing homes.One woman with dementia always looks for the same blanket. “She always says  it was the color of her mother’s aprons.” said Wendy Farr, communtiy relations coordinator for Rocky Mountain Health Care Services.“These sweet ladies have taken their handmade gifts and made a lot of people happy,” Farr said.They also do craft projects with a homemakers group through El Paso County Family and Communty Education. Ross,who worked in audio visual department for Colroado Springs School District 11 and raised four children, learned to crochet from her mother, who homesteaded in Eagle years ago.Thompson, who was employed by Hewlett Packard, taught herself to sew.“I call them the elves,” laughed Willa Hansen,  historian for the homemakers. She prodded the women to tell the story about the time they cut out patterns for more than 1,200 felt mice for Christmas gift baskets.Thomson was carrying a shoebox down the hall of her apartment complex, when the maintenance man asked what was inside.  She told him mice. The next day he showed up at the door to exterminate the varmints. “He asked, ‘Where are they?’ I told him they were drying out. I had just put glue on them.”The two women break into peals of laughter at their well-worn story.Laugh and crochet. Crochet and laugh.“It’s therapeutic,” noted Thompson.“We can’t dig ditches and fill sandbags, so we do what we can do for others,”  Ross said.