Stitched with care.

Byline: Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

An impulse as old as needle and thread drew a group of nurses, Girl Scouts and hobby sewers to the Quilt Patch on Saturday.

Women make quilts to comfort the sick and commemorate the dead. They do it to express their grief and their longings. They face the worst and best of life in the company of other women, foot on the pedal, eye on the needle and hands guiding the flow of fabric through their machines.

"When you have that emotional tie, you've got them for life," said Jane Baumgart, a nurse who convened the sewers to replenish her supply of comfort quilts for sick infants at the Sacred Heart Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

"We're hooked," admitted Ruth Buckley, a retired school psychologist who spins out a steady supply of quilt tops for the ongoing project.

Baumgart, 53, launched what has become the "Quilts of Hope" project a half-dozen years ago. She already was a longtime quilter, having started at age 21 after moving from her home in Ohio to Oregon - five days after finishing nursing school - to pursue what turned out to be a doomed relationship.

Her grandmother was a quilter. Her mother was a quilter. Baumgart learned it was a means of warding off loneliness, worry and stress. She also continued quilting in happier times, keeping busy during her children's swimming, ballet and soccer games.

In Baumgart's ward at the hospital, babies are tiny and sick and often stay for months. They're born way early. They've got Down syndrome. They've endured surgeries for gastric blockages.

Nurses are assigned as their primary caregivers. The infants must learn to breathe on their own and to eat and to grow. They suffer setbacks.

"You get close to them over those months," Baumgart said.

Naturally, Baumgart made a quilt for one of the babies she particularly loved.

At Sacred Heart, she said, the hospital encourages employees to seek ways to bring more compassion and caring to the workplace. There's even a question about it on the employee evaluation form.

Bingo, Baumgart thought. She could make a supply of quilts for all the sick babies - and for the dying babies, too. She would make those quilts entirely of flannel to be as comforting as possible to them and their parents. She would fill those quilts with cloud batting so they'd be extra soft.

Baumgart drafted other nurses to help her sew.

Nurse Molly Bryant tried her hand on Saturday. "I'm a baby beginner - can't you tell? I've got the seam ripper out," she joked. And later, seriously: "The parents really cherish these quilts."

The quilts bring a homey touch to the intensive care unit. They are fuzzy, warm color spots among the stark machinery needed to treat the infants. The nurses drape them over the isolettes so the infants can sleep.

On her own, Baumgart can turn out 50 or 60 quilts a year, but that's not enough. So she brought the project to the 15-member "Tuesday group" at the Quilt Patch, and many of the sewers there took up the cause and became her "Steady Eddies." All together, they boost production to 150 a year. The cost of materials is $30 to $45 for each quilt. And many people who don't sew donate money or fabric.

Baumgart fuels the quilters' passion by bringing them pictures of tiny infants wrapped in the sewers' own quilts.

Buckley, for instance, keeps a supply of fabric ready. She and her granddaughter sort scraps by color so they're easily fashioned into patterns, such as nine patch, snow ball, baby rails or trip around the world.

She's liable to be sewing at any time.

"I don't sleep very much," she said. "I'm a widow. The cat doesn't mind if I'm at the machine at three o'clock in the morning."

Candy Luis takes the tops made by the other women, layers them with the batting and the backs, then sews delicate patterns all across.

"It gives me direction. It gives me something to be interested in," Luis said.

Four Girl Scouts from the Western River Council joined in on Saturday.

"Grandma is going to be very proud of you - do you know that?" troop leader Nancy Williams said to her daughter, Jessica, who was bent over a machine.

The 9-year-old matched square to square, laying the stitches, pulling out the straight pins, lifting the presser foot and snipping threads. She was working on her second-ever quilt with the equanimity of a professional.

"The first time I did it, I was really nervous," she said.