Quilters put talents to work for charity

Group makes donations for The Salvation Army, UMC and Lied Animal Shelter

Jan Hogan/VIewQuilt Bags group member June McMurray, left, works with fellow quilter Joyce Trussell at Rainbow Library, 3150 N. Buffalo Drive, Oct. 9. The group, mostly made up of women who live on the west side of the valley, makes quilts and donates them to The Salvation Army each year, as well as baby-sized quilts for the pediatric department at University Medical Center and pillow case-like sacks to line cages at Lied Animal Shelter. Advertisement

It's been a yearlong labor of love with too many hours to count, but now the Quilt Bags group is about to make its annual holiday donation of dozens of handmade quilts to The Salvation Army.

The group meets once a month at Rainbow Library, 3150 N. Buffalo Drive, for a 21/2-hour session of cutting, pinning and sewing, with each person taking on a task to make things speed along, assembly-line style.

Normally, the group has 300 quilts to hand over for the holidays. For 2009, it will donate 100. The lower number bothered the group's chairwoman, Carol Hillie.

"This year was different," she said. "We couldn't get in here for nine months."

She was talking about library renovations that made the big meeting room inaccessible. So, the group was hustling to get as many quilts together as possible.

Quilt Bags is an offshoot of the Lone Mountain Quilters. Both are under the umbrella of the Desert Quilters of Nevada. Most of the women come from the west side of town. The choice of a name came from donations of cloth that were handed to Hillie in grocery sacks before the group officially was formed in 1995.

"As a little girl, I grew up in the Great Depression," Hillie said. "If I hadn't been given hand-me-downs, I would have run around barenaked, so I've always wanted to do charity work, give to others."

Members show up at the library as their schedules allow. Each monthly session usually sees a half-dozen women. This time, Oct. 9, had 10 women.

Setting up was done quickly, with work tables placed to ring the room near the outlets for sewing machines. In the center, a wide area was left open for rolling out the bolt of batting.

Making a quilt involves five steps: cutting the cloth, piecing it into a repeating pattern, sewing the top together, match a caking to it and sewing three sides, then adding the batting and closing it up.

Helen Baczynski is the group's batting specialist. She's an expert seamstress who makes some of her clothes. At her home, she has a 12-foot-long table with a long-arm machine that moves above it, such as a professional quilter would use.

Baczynski's job was cutting out the batting to match the varied sizes of the quilt tops. It meant getting down on the floor a lot, but she said it didn't make her back hurt.

"My knees get red and sore, but that's about it," she said.

Joyce Trussell was on the pinning team, making sure the layers matched up before they went to the sewers. She said she'd been pricked by pins many times.

"We call it 'sewer's hazard,' " she said.

Nearby, Renee Edwards was busy at a sewing machine. She said quilts have a hominess to them.

"I know how I feel with a quilt," she said. "They're cozy and warm and comforting. I want to give that feeling to someone else."

Yvonne Higgins brought her "old clunker" machine to the group meeting. She has other models at home, but just needed a basic one for this work.

"All you need to do is just a straight stitch," she said. "You don't need to do anything else."

Whatever isn't accomplished at the monthly get-together, members take home to finish.

All the cloth is donated. The group has to buy batting, which runs about $100 for 60 yards. They sell a couple of quilts to raise that money.

The Quilt Bags group also gives baby-sized quilts to University Medical Center's pediatric department, something it does about every three months. The latest effort saw 31 small quilts to give away. They were donated to the hospital, 1800 W. Charleston Blvd., Oct. 19.

"I used to be a UMC nurse," member Grace Johnson said. "So, helping the hospital is the (aspect) I like best."

Lied Animal Shelter also benefits. The leftover scrap cloth is used to fill pillow case-like sacks for dog and cat cages, so the animals don't have to sleep on hard wires.

Anyone interested in joining the group can call Hillie at 655-8213.

Contact Summerlin View and South Summerlin View reporter Jan Hogan at jhogan@viewnews.com or 387-2949.