Textiles in a small town High School

Earlier this week I drove north about 50 miles to the small town of Council, ID (pop. 850) to visit with Jodi Cook, the very dynamic textile teacher at the high school. She had asked me to come visit to help her make decisions about some of the donated fabric they've acquired. This is the only High School textile program that I'm aware of in the entire SW Idaho region. My jaw dropped when she took me into the classrooms, one room holds the three long arm quilting machines, another has stacks of fabric, and the main room has a row of Bernina machines, cutting matts, ironing boards and a very large variety of cutting tools.

The problem that she needs help with is that although she feels extremely blessed to have the abundance of fabrics that people have donated, a very large percentage of the fabrics are really not suitable for quilts, especially youngsters learning the craft. So my task is to help find places or people that could use them. There is a large selection of t-shirt knits and ribbing, lots of silky polyester fabrics and some very heavy knits. I was hoping to find a group that sews for children that are placed in protective services, but so far no luck. I'll be expanding my search to the Boise area, we are trying to keep it relatively local due to delivery issues.

While there I got to see some of the work the students have done and I was very impressed. She currently has 28 students and they average 3 quilts each per school year, some of course do several more. They also make quilts to donate locally, have used batting scraps to make pet beds for the local veterinary clinic, and bags for various projects. A very successful story when most school are doing away with any type of sewing program.

I finished piecing the donation quilt I started last week.

Then all the odd leftover scraps plus some larger pieces from my stash got pieced together for the back.

Now it just has to be quilted.

2018 Weekly Leaf #18

2018 Daily stitching days 125 -130

The bottom left corner is now done.

I'll be linking up with "Off the Wall Friday" and "Slow Sunday Stitching", go check them out and see what lots of others are doing.