Quilts make trips easier for students

By Cathy Spaulding
Phoenix Staff Writer

October 06, 2008 01:13 am

— Oklahoma School for the Blind students have a little warmth and a lot of color when they go on out-of-town trips this winter.
The school now has a “library” of 35 lap quilts and throws that were sewn by members of the Park Hill Oklahoma Home and Community Education club, or OHCE.
School Superintendent Karen Kizzia said students can “check out” the quilts when they go on long-distance bus rides during the winter.
“We’ll keep them ready for when it’s really cold and we have trips in the evening,” Kizzia said. “We’ll also use them for out-of- town academic tournaments and when our wrestling team goes to the North Central Tournament, or even the South Central Tournament.”
This year’s North Central Schools for the Blind wrestling and cheerleading tournament is held in Janesville, Wis., the South Central tournament was in Austin, Texas.
Students who live in other parts of Oklahoma might be able to check quilts out when they go home for the weekend.
Those bus rides can get long, tiresome and cold, students said.
Sophomore Cammie Loehr said it takes four hours in a car or five hours on the bus to get to her home in Lawton.
“I get home at 6:30 and it’s night-time,” she said. “I fall asleep a lot. We never all stay awake.”
Her classmate, Caitlyn Mathews, in her second year at OSB, said her three-hour trip home to Atoka does get cold.
The quilts are the latest gift OSB has received from the OHCE group, according to club member and OSB family and consumer science teacher Allison Garner.
Garner said the relationship began four years ago when the club was deciding on a project.
“We were bouncing around ideas when I mentioned the school had a shortage of personal hygiene products,” she said. “The club made tote bags for the kids and asked what they can do next.”
Since then the club made sun bonnets for students to mark the Oklahoma Centennial.
“They are a big booster for the school,” Garner said.
Park Hill Club President Bonnie Smith said the club helps the school “because OSB is usually not a group that someone living in the county does anything for.”
Smith said club members had heard that OSB students would take their own bedding for the bus trips.
Garner, who lives in Tahlequah, said about 23 club members have worked on the quilt project, which took about six months.
Most of the quilts are handmade by piecing together squares and sewing them to a backing. Yarn tassels pop out between some of the multi-colored squares.
Garner said she sewed on some of the quilts.
“I did a lot of purple pieces,” she said.
One woman, who does not even belong to the OHCE club, stitched patterns into the quilt she made for the school.
Club members also donated personal items such as boy’s and girl’s socks, panties, T-shirts, boxers, briefs, slips and other personal clothing items.
The Oklahoma Home and Community Education clubs used to be known as Home Demonstration of Extension Homemaker groups.

Reach Cathy Spaulding at 918-684-2928 or Click Here to Send Email

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