With gingerbread cookies fresh out of the oven in the classroom next door and students bustling around this one in a whirl of activity making pillows and quilt squares from fleece, Kalispell Middle School is as close to Santa’s Workshop as you’ll get without hitting the North Pole.
The students of the Family and Consumer Sciences classes were behaving especially elfishly last week as they created sewed fleece pillows of varying patterns and sizes for the residents of the Montana Veterans’ Home in Columbia Falls.
Corinne Cramer, the teacher responsible for the pillow project and for the class Sew Colorful, said her students typically learn sewing by crafting small pincushions, but when she learned the veterans at the home needed small pillows to ease the pressure on their legs, necks, backs, and arms, pincushions became an assignment of the past.
“We’re giving them to the veterans’ group to give as a gift,” Cramer said in a brief moment between assisting students.
Her students responded with aplomb, finishing a workload Cramer thought would take a week in a mere three days. The 117 pillows are made of donated fleece and stuffing, some of which Cramer herself purchased and donated to the cause.
The fleece was varied, with most of it tending toward solid colors, mostly in the browns, greens, reds and blues. There were a few patterned fleeces here and there, most notably an eye-catching Green Bay Packers theme.
Some of the pillows even included embroidered messages, written painstakingly with thread, in messages that thanked the veterans receiving the pillows.
The enthusiasm was such that Cramer has moved her class on to making quilts, though a couple students were still crafting pillows last Wednesday. One student, Kayla, 14, had just joined the class and was hard at work building a pocket for the stuffing to live in, and said she enjoyed sewing present for other people, and she had learned the craft from her grandmother.
Lacey McDunn, a 12-year-old seventh grader, was sewing her second pillow, and said it felt nice to be able to give a gift to people she doesn’t know.
“I think it’s a good idea because they need it, and they helped and they served,” McDunn said.
When asked why she would take the time to make a second pillow, McDunn said it hardly takes any time at all, and can make a difference for a veteran in Columbia Falls.
“You get to help your community,” she said.
And with that, she excused herself from a conversation with a visitor, because time waits for no elf, and she had work to finish her project before the bell rang.