Queen Bees craft quilts for charity

They come armed to the hilt, with sewing machines, needles and thread, boxes of fabric, bagged lunches and, sometimes, even cake.

The Queen Bees, a subgroup of Lynchburg’s Patches ‘n Pieces Quilt Club, meet at the Tabor Retreat Center once a month to make quilts for community chari-ties and organizations like the Central Virginia Area Agency on Aging, the Family Alliance and the Central Virginia Training Center.

The women usually work for about five hours on those days, doing everything from cutting fabric to sewing individual blocks together to assembling what will eventually become a finished quilt. They only rest for a brief lunch break, and then it’s back to work.

They made more than 150 quilts in 2009.

“That piece you have leftover, and you don’t know what to do with because it just doesn’t match anything?” explains club member Elaine Dodge. “You take it to the Queen Bees, and we find (somewhere) for it.”

The club, which has been around for more than 30 years, is holding a quilt show next week-end to raise money for the com-munity quilt project (see box for more information).

The Bees first started meeting in 2001 at the suggestion of then-club president Karen Baker, who invited members over to quilt in her basement once a month. The mother of four also coined the group’s name, says member Evelyn McMinn: “After her last boy, a friend said, ‘Now you’ll always be the Queen Bee.’”

Baker died two years ago, but her friends have kept the group going. Numbers vary from month to month, but they usually hold stead at about 10 members.

For these women, quilting is like a sisterhood. Their monthly meetings are a time for bonding over scraps of fabric and exercis-ing their creativity doing some-thing they love.

“It’s been a wonderful way to meet and make new friends,” says Marge Denham. “In a small group, the fellowship really comes out.”

Dodge says the club and Queen Bee meetings are also a good way to learn. She joined seven years ago and learned how to quilt from members through the club’s mentoring program.

“The people who have been doing it for years are so helpful,” she says, adding that it became a form of therapy that helped her deal with her husband’s death.

“It keeps us busy, and it keeps us young.”

While the community quilt project is driven by the Bees, the entire club contributes. Members make the individual blocks the Bees use from a different pattern every month.

“Each one of us can take the same block pattern, and the variety that comes out is just unbelievable,” Dodge says.

During their monthly meet-ings, the Bees primary focus is on assembling, not quilting. They sandwich the quilt tops and bot-toms they’ve made together, with batting in the middle. Then those are distributed back among club members for the actual quilting.

“The joy of the Queen Bees is if you just don’t feel very crea-tive, you can stand there and press cloth all day long. What-ever works for you is available,” says Jan Gray. “If you’re feeling really creative, you go over to the design board and figure out how to put them together.”

The creative outlet is enjoy-able, but it’s the quilts’ larger purpose that really resonates with them.

“It’s so neat to see somebody else smile when they get a gift,” says Phylis Fralick, who began quilting after she retired from teaching. “To take one day a month to do it for someone else is my way of giving back. I think everybody here feels that way. It’s one of those things that makes my life more important.”

The bulk of their donations go out during the holidays, but they’ll give them out whenever a need arises.

At the Agency on Aging, the quilts are often draped across the laps of clients who are in wheel-chairs.

“These are clients who don’t get a lot. They would not be able to go to a store to buy a blanket,” says Cheryl Murphy-Anderson, director of social services.

“They don’t have any other family. Some (didn’t) receive anything else this holiday season. It’s meant the world to them.”

At the Central Virginia Train-ing Center, the quilts hang on the walls for decoration.

“It just makes it so homey-looking,” says Calvin Staton, the center’s volunteer coordinator. “And we don’t have to worry about pictures falling off the walls. They can go up and touch them whenever they want. They love to take new people over and show (the quilts) to them.

“The little things we take for granted mean so much to them.”

The beauty of quilts is that they appeal to all ages, says Dodge, who often makes them as gifts. She gave quilts to each of her four grandchildren for Christmas this year, and she also made one for her sister’s 30th wedding anniversary.

“It’s something that was made special for them,” she says. “Something that’s unique.”