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Community Corner

Local Quilters Put Busy Fingers to Service Project Tasks

Once a month quilters gather at Piecing it Together to work on community service projects, including tote bags that are distributed by the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank.

Bolts of brightly colored cotton line the walls.

There’s a low hum of sewing machines stitching together fabric, the snipping sound of scissors cutting against a table, and the chatter of women’s voices.

Welcome to the monthly community service day at quilting supply shop .

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One day a month for about the last 19 years, shop owner Johanna Blanarik of Ross Township has been hosting the sessions. The quilts her volunteers make go to local hospitals, hospice centers, , women’s shelters and veterans hospitals. They’ve even gone as far as Afghanistan.

Blanarik doesn’t have an estimate of how many quilts her volunteers have made over the years.

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“We just do them,” she said. “We don’t count them.”

At her estimate of 10 to 12 quilts per month in 19 years, the women collectively have stitched and donated more than 2,500 quilts. A group from on Glenfield Road in assists with cutting the fabric and matching it up.

On a recent community service afternoon, Donna Dooley of Wexford is finishing a quilt, sewing the front and back together with batting in the center, using a large “mid-arm” machine, putting the pieces together with large looping stitches. 

In the center of the room, piles of batting, the material that goes inside the quilt, cover a large table. Next to the batting is a sewing machine and a finished quilt made from cheerful pieces of blue cotton fabric with flowers and ladybugs.

The wall is covered with finished quilts and pillowcases, advertising the shop’s .

One of the volunteers’ newest projects is making tote bags using donated denim fabric for The Pittsburgh Tote Bag Project, which collects new and gently used cloth tote bags for the region’s food pantries.

Sue Kerr, a  who is co-chairwoman of the project, said it was initiated after she watched an elderly man outside a food bank in Pittsburgh on distribution day struggling to catch his cabbage after the plastic grocery bag it was in burst. 

The project has three goals: to make it easier for people to carry food home from pantries; to reduce use of disposable plastic bags; and to allow pantries to use the money they spend on bags for food instead, Kerr said.

The project kicked off officially in April, though Kerr said she and others had been doing it informally for about two years. The bags are distributed through Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, which provides food to food pantries in 11 counties in southwestern Pennsylvania. It distributes more than 2 million pounds of food monthly, serving 120,000 people.

“This is helping people with something you already have lying around the house,” said Aria Charles, co-chairwoman of the project.

Kerr estimates that since April, the project has collected more than 1,900 cloth reusable bags, saving 6,000 plastic disposable bags from being used.

Blanarik and her shop’s volunteers got involved with the project through quilter Anne Walizer, a volunteer with the Tote Bag Project.

“I knew quilters love a good project, and it has been my experience that quilters go above and beyond,” Walizer said. “The response from Johanna’s clientele has just been overwhelming,” as have donations from another quilt shop, Quilter’s Corner in Finleyville, she said.

The project appeals to many quilters’ thrifty mentalities, Walizer said.

“There’s a component of … you don’t throw away any piece of fabric since you might be able to use it in a quilt, and I think that definitely carries over to the Tote Bag Project.”

Additionally, many quilters are very community-service oriented, she said.

“All the processes involved in the making of a quilt — it’s very Zen. There’s a peacefulness about it, and I think quilters want to pass that on. Giving back to the community is just in their mindset. You enjoy what you’ve made, and you want to pass it on to someone else.”

Carla Slater, one of the group of volunteers from , agrees.

“I like the idea that I’m doing this for someone who needs it,” she said. “I love to sew, and you can only have so many quilts for yourself."

Practically speaking, the bags help resolve a problem, said Iris Valanti of the Food Bank.

“If you go to a Produce to People distribution, you will see people with suitcases, laundry baskets and many times with nothing to carry the food home. Reusable shopping bags will alleviate some of that problem. Projects like this add some sense of normalcy and a little dignity to the process,” said Valanti in an email.

Kerr doesn’t know of any other cities in the country with similar projects and hopes to expand the idea. She said the group was always looking for groups to help via tote bag drives or corporate donations and would like to have additional drop-off points in the North Hills.

Meanwhile, back at the community service day, some of the ladies are discussing the merits of sewing with fleece. When Slater mentions that she learned to sew on her mother’s treadle sewing machine, she and Dooley agree that it is definitely harder to injure your finger sewing on a treadle machine.

A regular customer then walks into the store and Blanarik greets her: “Janet, we’re doing community service, can you stay and help?”

The machines keep humming. There’s a pile of fabric and lots of quilts and bags left to sew this afternoon.

For more information about ’s community service projects, visit the business' website at http://www.fyi.net/~piecitto/

For more information about the Pittsburgh Tote Bag Project, email tote4pgh@gmail.com.

Know of a club we should feature? Please contact Editor Larissa Dudkiewicz at larissa.dudkiewicz@patch.com.

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