Quilts

For some years now my wife has been making quilts. Most of these quilts have been donated to Access Community Health and designated for their perinatal clients (I think that is medical speak for a woman around the time of birth. The prefix peri refers to around the time of). The quilts are about the size of a lap quilt. This is a story of her quilting for charity.

One benefit of her organizing and reorganizing what she organized is that she took stock of scrap material she had from her many years of sewing quilts, and clothes. Frugal with her fabric, she cut the fabric into pieces to make quilts. This is just like it was done in the old days when quilt making was an pioneer way to use fabric scraps, to make something useful. We purchase the batting and she uses larger pieces of fabric for the back of the quilt. In some of her quilts I could recognize pieces of fabric which brought back memories of their use, mainly in clothes or items for our sons, although she recalled much more than I did. The quilts are well liked at Access Community Health. Her first donation was to Hospice, but they never again contacted her after her initial donation so they apparently lost interest. She came across someone who works for Access Community Health and she has been making the quilts for that organization, specifically the perinatal care unit ever since. Access Community Health will take all she can make. 

It looks like a tackling dummy
but it is batting for the homemade quilts

The high demand for the quilts poses a couple problems. First, she has run out fabric and scraps and has depended on fabric received from other people like friends, cousin, her mother, and some of her mother's friends. That supply ran out. Access Community Health so wants the quilts they took up a fabric collection for her and awhile back dropped off a few big boxes of fabric that she is now using. Not all fabric is useable for such a quilt, however.

On 29 November they contacted her and told her they were down to four quilts, and wondered if she had more. Luckily she had a supply ready to go, which they picked up the same day. Access Community Health delivers 20 to 45 babies per month. A quilt seems to be offered to the perinatal clients and some will take a quilt, others not. As only females and nurses can do, the staff at Access Community Health ooh and aah over the quilts, because they can become a prized possession to a young mother and her infant child. My wife was told that her quilt was the only covering one mom had for her newborn, which was wrapped in the quilt when the mom and baby came to appointments. 

Quilts awaiting pickup, 29 Nov 2023

So far, my wife has donated 284 quilts, of which 264 of those went to Access Community Health and the perinatal clinic.  (This is those that have been kept track of, the total may well be greater.) This keeps her down in the basement, I refer to it as her dungeon, for good parts of many days. It is for a good cause. It also keeps her out of my hair for a bit of time. As the saying goes: "A retired wife is a husband's full time job." Or, do I have that saying backwards?

On 9 Dec she saw a post on Facebook Marketplace of a person selling a homemade quilt; it turned out to be one of her homemade quilts which she had donated to Agrace Hospice. The woman said she bought it at a quilt sale. Her handmade quilts have obtained buyer status. Apparently the family who received the quilt, or Hospice itself, sold the quilt to make a few dollars.

Quilts are cozy and comforting, wrapping infants, children and adults to keep them warm on cold days of the long winter. It is like comfort food. It is a great gift, from a hearty and kind soul, to welcome an infant into the world.