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Three CCQ members volunteered their quilting skills to design and construct quilts for a production of the play Quilters, which is being performed at McMinnville’s Gallery Theater this month. Peggy Gelbrich, an instructor in our Tuesday morning class, designed the quilts shown at left and coordinated the efforts of a group of quilters to make the quilts. Peggy also designed another quilt to be raffled for fundraising. Bobbie Bebereia, a CCQ board member, did the longarm quilting on the quilts in the show and the raffle quilt. And Donna Gilbo, a CCQ member who works behind the scenes assembling kits for our students, worked behind the scenes for the Quilters play too, helping make the raffle quilt on a short deadline. Quilters is the story of a pioneer woman and her six daughters. It blends a series of interrelated scenes into a mosaic, capturing the sweep and beauty, the terror and joy, the harsh challenge and abiding rewards of frontier life. Details about upcoming performances of Quilters can be found on the Gallery Theater’s website. Hurry though — the last performance is March 16th.  

Coffee Creek Quilters is featured in a video available from TheQuiltShow.com, a web-based “TV show” produced by Alex Anderson and Ricky Tims. The segment on CCQ is part of TQS episode #1205, “Picture This: Simplified Pictorial Piecing” with Sue Rasmussen, a quilter who teaches simplified piecing techniques for landscape and pictorial quilts. The complete show runs 52 minutes. The CCQ segment was filmed in August 2012 at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility by a TQS film crew. It includes interviews with CCQ past president Mary Ann McCammon and several of our students in the Tuesday morning class. It gives viewers a unique opportunity to see how a prison quilting program is run. We thank TheQuiltShow.com for their generosity in creating the video segment about our quilting program and hope you will find an opportunity to watch it.  

This week CCQ donated three instructor-made quilts to Rotary Club of Wilsonville to auction at their Heart of Gold Dinner & Auction on February 23rd. Heart of Gold is a fundraiser for Rotary activities including Through A Child’s Eyes, a program Rotary sponsors in partnership with the Oregon Department of Corrections. Each year, Rotary holds two TACE events at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility — a winter event where moms and kids do fun activities and enjoy a visit with Santa Claus, and a summer event where the moms and kids take part in crafts, games and an outdoor barbecue inside the facility. Women incarcerated at CCCF must earn the right to be included in the TACE program through good behavior. Coffee Creek Quilters also participates in the summer TACE program by offering a crafts table at the two-day event.

CCQ’s kit-making volunteers meet periodically to put together quilt kits for our students’ first and second quilts. It’s a fun activity where we have the opportunity to get together with other quilters and explore our creative abilities with color and design. Each kit includes a pattern, fabric and thread. First quilt patterns introduce basic concepts and include rectangular shapes. Second quilt patterns build skills by introducing half square triangles and other more advanced techniques. We welcome donations of 100% quilting cotton (minimum 1-yard lengths), thread and quilting notions. We also welcome cash donations to help us purchase solid color and tone-on-tone “blender” fabrics.

Theresa Eggleston’s membership in Coffee Creek Quilters goes back to 2002, the year Koko Sutton founded our program and recruited her as an instructor. Theresa remembers the early days when there was just one quilting class and six sewing machines at CCCF. At first instructors brought fabric from home and used their own favorite patterns. We’ve grown considerably since then; today we have four weekly classes, twenty sewing machines, a nice fabric stash, and a collection of tested classroom patterns. Theresa retired as an instructor this year, so we honored her at our December brunch/meeting. Theresa and Mary Ann McCammon, pictured at left, plan to write Coffee Creek Quilters’ history next year.

IBM has awarded a grant of $500 to support Coffee Creek Quilters’ fabric purchasing project.  The grant was made in recognition of the volunteer service of IBM retiree, Martha Messa.  IBM’s Community Service grants are based on requests from employees or retirees who have a record of active and ongoing involvement with not-for-profit corporations and schools. Martha serves as CCQ’s Program Coordinator and teaches in the Tuesday morning class. The fabric purchasing project supports the purchase of “blender” fabrics. While most of the fabric in CCQ’s prison quilting program comes from donations, there is an ongoing need for solid-color and tone-on-tone fabrics that coordinate with donated prints and focus fabrics. IBM’s generous grant allows us to satisfy this need with many additional colors.