Her nonprofit – giving homemade Easter baskets to children – has grown over the past nine years, to the point where an ordinary individual might welcome help packing all those baskets, containing everything from snacks to toys to clothing.

But Fellows, 57, is no ordinary woman. Her passion to give to others in a creative manner is unmatched. She’s created a factory-like conveyor belt at her home in Pittsfield to produce each basket.

A conveyor belt of one. Fellows knows where everything is in her chaotic and crowded living room and kitchen. That’s the way her home looks each year at this time, full of items that wait on deck in plastic bins for transfer to baskets, and others that are already packed, covered by cellophane and tied with pipe cleaners that her husband, his eyes rolling, had broken in half the night before.

It’s all part of a routine, a rhythm that allows Fellows to pack baskets quickly.
That’s how she managed to smash her old record by making 250 baskets this year.

That’s why her friend, Sally Kelly, nominated her to be a Monitor Hometown Hero.

Help from a neighbor, a friend? No thanks. Fellows says she’s good to go. She worries that an outsider will feel intimidated by the organized perfect storm that now dominates her house. She worries a helper could get lost.

“People offer to help me often,” said Fellows. “But I have a system, and I don’t know if the system is weird. In my mind, I know that I want to put this, this and this into a basket. Then I have to go tell them to get something, and it’s like, ‘Good luck finding it.’ ”

Once, shortly after moving to Pittsfield nine years ago, Fellows began handmaking baskets for needy children. She made 22 as a rookie, then had to speed things up as orders began to rise. The list of kids receiving baskets continues to rise, and she’s now added more troubled youths who attend school at the Pine Haven Boys Center in Allenstown. Thus, the 250 baskets. She attaches characters to her work. She calls them themes. Elmo, a shark, a troll.

Her production increased, from 22 to 80 to 211 to the 250 she manufactured this year. In the process, she used social media, asking children what they want or need and going to the Dollar Store to get it. Or, she’d come across something she thought a youngster might want, buy it, then announce on Facebook that the item was available, no charge, of course.

Fellows says she donates about $600 to the cause annually, adding that the community, more and more, has been contributing, to the point where Fellows received $300 this year, plus about $2,000 worth of toys and candy and crunchy snacks.

She does post-Christmas shopping for low prices and stores the merchandise in her attic until the Easter Bunny starts hopping.

“She’s very softspoken and quiet and I’ve never seen her without a smile,” said Kelley, Fellows’s nominator. “She does not live in a fancy home, and it fills with Easter baskets. I’ll ask people to pick up the baskets and I have to bring them to Pine Haven and she says, ‘They will have new boys there by then. If so, call me and I’ll make new ones.’ ”

The ones she’s already made contain spotted bears and cookies, furry monkeys and colored pens, M&M’s and Cheez-Its, Batman comic books and books about animals.

As the holiday approaches, Fellows’s giddiness is obvious, but she says she remains that way year-round. She’s donated clothing and toiletries to the homeless and fed abandoned cats.

But the children hold a special place in Fellows’s heart. She has her own policy related to no child left behind.

“I don’t turn anyone away,” Fellows said. “I want the children to have a happy Easter.”