The glow from the late afternoon sun spread across the room where volunteer Nancy Parsons was gently pinning a quilt top to large pieces of interior batting and cotton backing, forming a three layer “quilt sandwich”. Her experienced fingers pushed the pins through the cloth with a precision developed through countless hours of sewing - and with each stitch the quilt slowly revealed its beauty and purpose - to provide warmth, comfort and love.

Parsons, along with a dozen current and retired Littleton Public School employees have gathered weekly over 17 years to create more than 1,000 of these wonderful quilts. The ladies donate the finished quilts to kids at the Village North preschool, the Options infant program, local charities and family shelters, and around the world to a Chinese orphanage. Utilizing the cafeteria space at the Education Service Center in Littleton to create these labors of love, the volunteer seamstresses have produced more than 65 quilts this year, with no signs of slowing down.

Nancy Parsons uses safety pins to temporarily secure each square before the quilt is finished.

“It gives me a purpose, a reason to get out of the house and do something for others,” said Christine Peepgrass, one of the founding members of the group. “We started this quilting group in January of 2000 and have nothing but fun every time we get together!”

Across the room, quilter Jeanette Egan is arranging strips of cloth that will become the geometric “blocks” for the top layer - the colorful squares that give a quilt its distinctive look. She carefully pins them together with just enough seam remaining for Peepgrass to run the pieces through her sewing machine. The finished blankets are a comfortable lap robe size at 40” x 54” inches. To find material that looks good together, the ladies sort through hundreds of pounds of donated cloth, separating it by color and texture and then carefully trimming it into strips of specific widths.

It takes teamwork to get the quilt through the sewing machine (l-r Christine Peepgrass, Nancy Parsons).

Peepgrass says, “It amazes me how we can take all of this scrap material from so many different sources, lay it out and decide how it will look good together. The finished product is so beautiful that it seems like we planned every step of the process - but really, it just comes together out of our love for quilting and for the kids that get the final product.”

While these ladies, including quilters Daphne Cole and Kathy Gibbons, have been sharing their gift of quilting for decades, the quilted blanket has been around for a much longer time. The word “quilt” first appears in English around 1300, but an Egyptian Pharaoh of the First Dynasty (3400 B.C.) is often depicted wearing a quilted garment, and knights in the Middle Ages wore quilts under their armor to protect their skin from the heavy metal. The oldest surviving American quilt only dates to 1704, as it was common practice for the remaining fabric from an older quilt to be “repurposed” into a newer one as the old quilt fell apart.

Finding the right combination of complementary materials is a key to making a beautiful quilt.

The ladies have found that quilting is a welcomed break from the hectic pace of everyday life, as the meticulous rhythm of passing a needle and thread through the fabric again and again slows everything down around them. A major benefit of the quilting group is the friendships that develop. As they share stories during the afternoon about family and travel and retirement, more work gets finished, including tying quilt knots, ironing seams and preparing material for their new volunteer product...making burp bibs for infants. With more than 10,000 volunteer hours invested in the group’s 17 years of quilting, Egan smiled as she thought about how long the ladies would continue to quilt, proclaiming “as long as kids need to stay warm and need to know they are loved, we will be making quilts.”

To donate quilting supplies (fabric, batting, thread and embroidery floss) to the quilters, contact Pam Hubbard, Volunteer Coordinator at Littleton Public Schools at 303-347-3414.

Jeanette Egan “designs” another quilt pattern from volumes of donated materials.

Nancy Parsons, Jeanette Egan and Christine Peepgrass with some of the quilts they have made this year.