One of the first quilts May Pollock can remember making with the Heartland Quilters’ Guild is one for the Alberta Summer Games, though since then she’s helped put together many of the bedspreads, which are just as often used to keep sleepers warm as they are for art.
With her soft Scottish burr and her battered sewing machine, Pollock is one of the fixtures in the organization, which has sewn together for more than two decades.
The guild works together to make a quilt for the Festival of Lights, as well as comfort quilts for people going through unexpectedly traumatic, stressful or tragic times and are in need of a comforting gift.
Though the making of the quilts themselves is enjoyable, it’s the people that has kept Pollock – and most of the others in the group – involved for all these years, she said.
Pollock said she had never made a quilt before joining the group.
“I’d taken a few classes, and then we had our first quilting retreat at Ol’ MacDonald’s,” she recalled. “We were out in the machine shop those first few years.”
The group eventually relocated to Rochon Sands for its retreat, though there are many fond memories of that first location.
“There were always cats having kittens,” Pollock recalled with a laugh. “And they wanted to nest in our cloth!”
The quilters managed to keep the material safe from the feline mothers, though.
Like Pollock, Norma Byers hadn’t made a quilt before joining the group, though she’d watched her mother-in-law make them.
“I’ve been quilting now for about 10 years, all with Heartland Quilters,” she said. “I knew how to sew, but didn’t know how to quilt.”
Her mother-in-law, Emily Byers, had been part of the group and had brought her daughter-in-law into the fold.
“Now it’s like therapy,” Byers said, nimbly guiding her project through the sewing machine, stitching rectangles of fabric together to create a “log cabin” quilt square.
The group met that night at the Hub’s craft room, where they were working on creating the quilt squares for the annual Festival of Lights quilt. The quilt is raffled off with the money going to the hospital foundation, which uses the money to help with upgrades, expensive purchases and every-day items that help with the comfort of patients.
One of those quilts once raised $10,000.
A flannel blanket is pinned to the wall, where the quilters try to plan out their quilt, designing the pattern and layout of the various squares. Before the quilt is finished, this wall will hold many different arrangements before the final pattern is chosen.
The guild is one of two quilting groups operating in the Stettler area, but the Heartland guild maxes its membership at 25 members.
Until a person retires from the group, there’s no space for new people. It’s not done to be elitist, one quilter noted, but simply because they meet in each other’s’ homes and are trying to keep the group to a number that doesn’t overwhelm the members’ space.
It also allows the group to form strong, lasting friendships.
“We made a cookbook,” Carrie Kuefler, one of the members, said. “We would meet in each other’s homes and we’d have all this good food so it was inevitable.”
Like everyone else, the quilting brought Kuefler to the group, but it’s the people that made her stay.