Stitches quilt shop of Pima recently helped bring the community together for a single cause: Make 100 quilts for humanitarian use by the end of February. “I got the idea just before the new year. I thought we needed to do a humanitarian thing,” said Deanna Mangum, manager of Stitches. “Nelda Potter, the store owner, backed us 100 percent.”

They did minimal advertising by putting up signs in the Pima Post Office, the Taylor Freeze, in their building, sending e-mail and by word of mouth. “I was going to set a goal for 50 quilts, but then I marked that off and put 100. I thought I’d rather reach 54 than 49,” Mangum said.

With the community’s help, Stitches exceeded its goal of 100 by more than a dozen quilts. “We were kind of worried at first; nobody was doing much,” said Karol Lyn Woodall, a worker at Stitches. “Then it kind of snowballed.”

Quilt-making brought the community together in an effort to assemble 100 quilts for humanitarian use by the end of February. The goal was exceeded by more than a dozen quilts. Contributed photo

Stitches staff were approached by the LDS Pima Stake, which wanted to do a service project in association with its women’s conference. Stitches provided 13 unfinished quilts, and the women finished all of them that day. The store also had finished quilts donated by the women at Lexington Pines and by members of the Cactus Needle Quilt Guild, a local group for quilters. Other people throughout the community donated piles of fabric, large bags of yarn, batting and hours of their time in finishing the quilts.

“One of the neatest stories is about a woman from the quilting guild. She had this friend who passed away, and he loved knowledge,” Mangum said. “She went out and specifically bought this fabric (with books in bookshelves) in honor of him and made a quilt in hopes that it goes to a little kid who loves learning.”

The quilts have been sent to the LDS Humanitarian Center in Mesa. From there the quilts will be shipped to Salt Lake City. “Then they’ll be sent all over the world to where people are taking their babies home in newspaper and for flood victims all over the United States,” Mangum said.

Potter, Mangum and Woodall send a big public “Thank you” to everyone who helped them exceed their goal. “Quilters have the best hearts; they do,” Mangum said. “It was just neat that this was not a religious thing. This was not even to support our shop. Everyone just joined in.”