Homemade helpfulness

Michael Zennie, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette - Sandra Lee remembers standing in the checkout line as a young girl, using food stamps and welfare money to buy groceries and diapers for her four younger siblings. Behind her in line was the most popular student in class and her mother.

It was that moment, Lee said, when she decided that she was going to make something of herself and ensure no one in her family would have to experience what she did.

Lee was the keynote speaker Friday at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne’s Tapestry: A Day for Women.

Now the author of several best-selling cookbooks and the host of the popular Food Network shows “Semi-Homemade Cooking” and “Sandra’s Money Saving Meals,” Lee shared her life story – a young girl forced to help raise her four siblings from the time she was 9 – onstage at Memorial Coliseum.

Tapestry gives local women a day to take time off for themselves, come together and learn something new. It also raises money for scholarships at IPFW.

“This is about women helping women and women helping themselves,” Lee said of the event before her speech.