Arts & Entertainment

Changing Lives, One Stitch at a Time

The women of Quilts for Kids meet weekly at the Mountain View Senior Center to sew quilts for hospital-bound children and local homeless families.

It's not an unfamiliar scene. The kids have grown up and left the nest, and you've finally reached retirement age. Now you're looking forward to your twilight years, and one thought comes to mind. What the heck do you do with yourself now?

For a group of local women back in 1991, that scenario offered them the opportunity to spend time working on their beloved craft of choice: quilting. But little did they know it would also lead them to change hundreds—if not thousands—of lives just by doing what they love.

Quilts for Kids brings together a group of women from several nearby cities—Mountain View, Los Altos, Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Sunnyvale—every Friday at the Mountain View Senior Center. While the women enjoy each other's friendship, they work on quilts that afterward they will donate to children at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford and at the San Jose Family Supportive Shelter.

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"This group performs a wonderful community service," said member Margaret Peterson of Mountain View. "It's something I can do, because I'm retired."

Quilts for Kids got its start at the Quilting Bee, a supply store that used to be in Los Altos. Peterson remembered the woman who owned the store, Diana Leone, was a published quilting author and started the group with a few core members who frequented the store. Peterson and many Quilts for Kids members still carry around tote bags to this day that show off the logos of sponsors the group used to have back in the Quilting Bee days, to help cover the costs of supplies.

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Unfortunately, the Quilting Bee moved to a new storefront in a new city, and the new space had no room to spare for Quilts for Kids. The group found itself temporarily without a home.

But the members wouldn't be swayed. Eventually, the Mountain View Senior Center offered them a room to meet in once per week.

"We're very grateful that the Mountain View Senior Center gives us this room each Friday," said Peterson.

"Without it, we wouldn't have a space," said another fellow longtime member, Barbara Johnson of Sunnyvale. "We don't have any money to rent a space. We don't have any sponsors anymore or anything. We're just a group of women on our own."

According to Peterson and Johnson, members have come and gone over the years—some have moved away; some have passed away—but a core group of five or six women remains strong and loyal and have developed strong bonds over the years.

"These are my closest friends, my buddies," said Peterson. "This group has been wonderful to me."

The group offers not only friendship but also a feeling that the work they do makes a difference for people who really need it, said the members.

"I like to sew and I already had too many quilts of my own, so I wanted to help the children," said Carolyn Gulledge of Menlo Park. "I heard about this group through the Quilting Bee as well. As soon as I heard about it, I came and joined this lovely group. Now I have a home."

They may be small but they are certainly mighty, added Peterson.

"We're a small group, but the five or six of us really turn out a lot of quilts," she said. "We usually turn in about a dozen every month, but this [time of year] we're even doing extra holiday quilts."

Peterson and Angi Peck of Mountain View, another core member, explained that they do most of the work on their sewing machines at home and they bring in what they've worked on each Friday to their meeting.

They love to chat and catch up with each other, and show off what they've completed over the past week.

Then, they whip out their tool bags to help each other "tie," the final step in the process of finishing a quilt, which is done by hand with needle and thread.

"Getting together each Friday, it's inspiring to see each other's work," Peterson said. "That's a big part of it."

The women said that although some quilts end up in the hands of parents or other adults, the majority go to kids, so for the most part they try to use kid-friendly patterns.

"We try to make them kid-friendly, with dogs or fire trucks or rocket ships, and so forth," Peterson said.

"Also, they're really geared toward keeping a homeless child warm at night, so they're simple, not overly artistic or complicated. They need to be able to withstand a lot of washing and a lot of moving about, since the families get to keep the quilts when they leave the hospital or leave the shelter."

Once or twice a month, members call up the San Jose Family Supportive Shelter and Lucille Packard and arrange to either drop off a mass donation of quilts, or have someone from the organization come to their home to pick them up.

Ken Wong, volunteer coordinator at the San Jose Family Supportive Shelter, said the quilts make a huge difference in the lives of the families that receive them.

"They really appreciate the quilts," he said. "It's very cold here and these families, they live in rooms with linoleum floors, so they're very helpful in keeping them warm."

Wong explained the shelter allows Santa Clara County families to live on site for up to 90 days at a time, while they get their lives and finances in order. For school-age children, they try to keep them in school and the parents work with counselors on the goal of becoming a self-sustaining family once again.

"We run a lot of workshops about financial literacy, job development training, resume writing, and so forth," Wong said. "We really help them get their finances and their lives back on track."

According to Peterson the cause really spoke to her when she first heard about the group so many years ago.

"I have grandchildren, so I can't bear to think of children out there with nothing to keep them warm, simply because they've fallen on hard times," she said. "We are told that some of these children arrive at the shelter with maybe a teddy bear and that's all. So they get to pick from the pile of that month's donations from us."

As for supplies, the Quilts for Kids group tries to be self-sustaining as well. Peterson added the group relies on donations of fabric, and money from the sale of some of the extra holiday-themed quilts they make around this time each year, which they sell at the annual community center bazaar in Mountain View.

Peterson explained that their goal is to sell 35 or 40 quilts at the holiday bazaar.

"That money raised buys all our supplies for the entire next year," Peterson said. "It costs us about $1,000 each year to make all of our quilts. If we don't have any money left, then we buy the supplies out of our own pockets."

Therefore, sometimes the quilts are mismatched squares made from smaller amounts of donated fabric, patched together; and sometimes the quilts are one big piece of fabric stitched up, if they had one big donation or were able to purchase one big amount of matching fabric.

"So, even small amounts of leftover fabric being donated can be useful," Peterson said. "We barely throw away any fabric—if we have any leftovers, we add them to the 'stash,' as we quilters call it."

Quilts for Kids rewards not only the children who receive these special quilts, but the quilters who stitch each one of them together with love.

For more information on the Quilts for Kids group, call Megan at the Mountain View Senior Center at 650-903-6330.


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