Sew What Community Sewing Group 2014 Community Service Project

Sew What Group has been extremely busy since the start of 2014 making cough pillows for the cancer treatment center at Norton Suburban Hospital in Louisville!  Recently, Lee and I delivered over 250 cough pillows to Norton Suburban.  The nurses and coordinator of the unit were absolutely blown away by the group's generosity.  And, for good reason!  Two of our ladies made close to 225, themselves!  There are six of us who have been making pillows. Yesterday, at our March meeting, more than 160 more pillows were brought to me to get delivered.  I am really looking forward to delivering this next batch of cough pillows.

The pillows are used by breast cancer surgery, heart surgery and prostate cancer surgery patients to hold against their mid-section when needing to cough or sneeze.  I'm told that the patients LOVE their cough pillows.  They take the pillows with them everywhere.  Some patients even give their pillow a name!  How sweet!

 Here are photos of the last group of cough pillows that were delivered.  Photos of the most recent group will follow in another post.

Some of the fabric was donated by the husband of a woman who died from breast cancer about 3 1/2 years ago.  I know she would be happy about how we're using her fabrics!

Sew What! Community Sewing Group Update

This is the first of several articles I'll be posting about what our community sewing group, Sew What!, has been doing so far this year.

The first is about our project to sew shoulder bags for an orphanage in Haiti.  This is a photo of the bag I made as a model to teach the class how to make the bags.  Our Louisville Area Master Clothing Volunteers made 39 of these shoulder bags at our work day in January.  There were 10 shoulder bag kits left, so I brought them to our January Sew What! sewing class and taught them how to sew the bags together.

The students took them home to finish.  At our class last Thursday, they brought back 13 finished shoulder bags!  Thank you so much, Bonnie, Patsy, Rebecca and Jan!  Patsy even made 8 more out of some upholstery fabric she had at home!  You ladies ROCK!!!!

This is the same bag that's in the photo above.  It's been reversed.  These shoulder bags are reversible and are sewn primarily of upholstery fabric.

One of our Master Clothing Volunteers drew up the pattern for the bags so they are easy to make, but are very functional.  I had one shoulder bag kit remaining, so I gave it to one of the students who wasn't able to come to the January class.  I know she will bring back a beautifully made bag to our March sewing class.

Here are some of the shoulder bags that were brought to our class on Thursday.  The bag kits were made with upholstery fabric that was donated to the project by a fabric store in Shelby County.

The fabrics look like a mish-mash of patterns and colors, but they turned out to be very cute.  Everyone did a great job of combining what they were given to make the flaps and the linings go together so well.

These shoulder bags can be used for carrying books or personal belongings.  They have a shoulder strap, but it isn't really long.  I think the length of the strap is good for children, so the bags won't be uncomfortably long.


My heartfelt thanks goes out to my Sew What! sewing students for taking on this project with such ease, for a job well-done!  You ladies are the greatest!

Master Clothing Volunteer Work Day

Tomorrow is our semi-annual Master Clothing Volunteer work day at the Shelby County Cooperative Extension Service Office.  We'll be working on two community service projects: comfort caps and baby blankets.  This is always a fun time for us volunteers.  We get together to make projects for community service, we learn from each other by showing the projects that we made at our annual fall training in Jabez, KY, sharing tips and techniques, we talk and laugh and give each other ideas for more projects to teach in our individual communities, we make a plan of work for the coming year, and we eat!   It's always a fun day.

We'll meet again in June to recap our year since the previous June, and to complete our reports of the number of volunteer hours we've accumulated in that span of time.  We get inspiration from each other for projects to teach to eager students in our own communities and for sewing workshops we may want to provide.  We've become a close-knit group of like-minded sewists, who love sharing our craft with others!

I will begin 2011 with my community sewing group (Sew What?), at the Jeffersontown Public Library on the 4th Thursday of January, with a lesson on how to clean and maintain our sewing machines and sergers.  In a class at our volunteer training last fall, I learned some valuable tips on machine cleaning and maintenance that I didn't know before.  This is how we share our knowledge with our communities: learning new things at our annual training, then teaching it in our local areas in free classes.  That's what Cooperative Extension is all about!