Quilting for a cause at Cheney High School

It was a project to sew together, literally, the past and the present to benefit the future.

Members of the Cheney High School Family Career and Community Leaders of America club recently completed a quilt made from old CHS activity T-shirts and uniforms.

The quilt, a group effort cobbled together from items donated by students and teachers, will be raffled off and the proceeds will benefit the local club and their chosen national charity, the March of Dimes.

FCCLA adviser Karlyn Urdahl said a group of students in the club started pursuing the idea after another school’s FCCLA had success raffling off a quilt themed around their school.

“We wanted to stick with the school colors and the Cheney High School theme,” Urdahl said.

The quilt, completed by the students last week, contains sports T-shirts from winning seasons, swatches of marching band uniforms, athletic training shirts and more. The students cut squares from the shirts and sewed them together with grey sweatshirt fabric with a layer of batting and a layer of backing fabric to complete the quilt.

Urdahl said the students did all the construction themselves, led by a couple of more experienced sewers. One has been pursuing fashion design and knows her way around a sewing machine, and another learned to sew from her grandmother.

“They did a lot of the actual sewing,” Urdahl said. “The rest of them did a lot of ironing.”

Besides the work of making the quilt, the group of students also spent lunch hours selling raffle tickets to their peers and took tickets home to sell to friends and family.

They hope to make enough money to donate a portion to the March of Dimes, a nonprofit organization that works to prevent health threats to babies by providing education to parents and the public. The rest of the money will go to the club. Their biggest cost comes in the form of travel for students whose projects qualify for state and national competitions. Last summer, the CHS FCCLA club sent six members to the national leadership meeting in Orlando, Fla. Urdahl said the club currently has around 25 members.

Becky Thomas can be reached at [email protected].