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| 1/26/2007 11:16:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article |
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| Longtime Linus Connection member Rekha Nadkarni sews the finishing label onto a quilt donated for a needy child. |
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| Linus Project member and web mistress Jennifer Ofenstein places the club’s sign during the monthly meeting Saturday at St. Phillip’s Methodist Church. |
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The Linus Connection creates blankets of love for kids
MISTIE HOUSEHOLTER
City Reporter
Four-year-old Devon Vogel's green Winnie the Pooh blanket provides him with a sense of security beyond that felt by most young children. The homemade blanket makes Devon feel comforted and reassured, during his monthly trips to the Children's Hospital of Austin to receive blood transfusions.
"He gets a sense of security from his blanket because it's something he got at the hospital. It's the feeling that everything's going to be OK and they're going to take care of him that he gets from it," said Devon's mother, Tami Vogel.
Devon received the blanket from the local nonprofit group, The Linus Connection, when he was in the hospital being diagnosed with a genetic immune deficiency at 25-months-old.
"On hospital day, he gets his blanket and his pillow and he uses them to cover up because they give him medicine to make him sleepy," Vogel said, adding that she now crochets blankets as a volunteer with The Linus Connection while she's at the hospital for Devon's six- to eight-hour treatments.
"I know how much it meant to our family so I know I'm passing that on to someone else's family," Vogel said.
The Round Rock-based Linus Connection - named after the famous blanket-carrying Peanuts cartoon character - began supplying handmade quilted, crocheted and no-sew fleece blankets to Central Texas children in 2000.
The blankets are first delivered to about 20 area hospitals, children's shelters, grief support centers and child protective services agencies and then passed on to sick, abused, neglected or at-risk children up to age 17.
"I think it's very important that we know they're being utilized. I think it will cheer up children from abused homes, as well as those in hospitals," said Linus Connection member Marge Lentricchia.
Executive Director Stephanie Sabatini founded The Linus Connection after reading a newspaper story about a similar group in Colorado called Project Linus. That group was founded in 1995 to make blankets for patients in the Denver Children's Cancer Center.
Sabatini was new to Austin when she founded the group but quickly recruited enough volunteers to make the 50 blankets she promised to her first partner organization, the Texas Baptist Children's Home in Round Rock.
The group made 2,003 blankets in the year 2000 and, in 2006 with 300 volunteers, made 4,103 blankets for area children.
"We had women who had been making blankets and putting them in a bag in the closet because they didn't' have anywhere to give them to," Sabatini. said. "They wanted to make blankets but all their children or grandchildren had blankets. We love making blankets and we love giving blankets to people."
The Linus Connection holds monthly meetings on the third Saturday of the month at St. Philip's United Methodist Church in Round Rock. Volunteers sew on the group's signature blanket tags and poems, sort blankets for distribution, learn new techniques and pick up supplies for blankets.
Volunteers can also make blankets at one of four smaller group meetings in Cedar Park, Georgetown, Liberty Hill or Wimberley or drop off blankets with members and businesses in Round Rock, Cedar Park, Georgetown and Austin.
Members can make any size child's blanket and are given latitude to choose their own patterns and colors, which adds to the appeal of the blankets, even if it's not immediately apparent.
"I once got a blanket that was brown and purple and I thought, 'Oh dear, what am I going to do with this blanket?'," said Sabatini. "I took the blanket to a hospital and I got a thank you note from a nurse who said a girl had taken the blanket. The nurse asked, 'Why did you take this blanket?' and the girl said, 'It reminds me of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and I'm not allowed to have peanut butter and jelly anymore.'."
"So I say there's no ugly quilt. Every quilt's going to mean something to a child."
Sabatini lights up as she tells the story relayed to her by the director of a girls home in Georgetown. The girls were unhappy about changes being made to the operating structure of the home and planned to run away to show their disapproval. Luckily, staff thwarted the girls' plans after finding their packed duffel bags under a tree nearby. Inside the bags were the girls' Linus blankets.
"Every time I think I can't do this anymore, I think of those stories and the fact that it means something to them," said Sabatini, adding that the one-of-a-kind blankets are especially meaningful to children who may have never received a handmade blanket.
Linus Connection volunteers rarely meet the children who receive their blankets but Sabatini recalls the first and only delivery she made to an emergency children's shelter at a YMCA five years ago in the middle of summer. Sabatini had just finished neatly laying out the blankets on a couch when five sweaty teenage boys on a break from a basketball game rushed in to pick out their new blankets.
"They say, 'Hey, blankets, cool!' and start digging through the blankets and throwing them everywhere. I couldn't have been happier," she said.
"They finally found the blankets they wanted and slung them over their shoulders, and as they're walking out I said, 'I'm sorry they're blankets in July' and they say, 'No way man, the dorms get cold at night.' Then one of the guys turns and says, 'Hey, tell the ladies we said thanks.'."
For more information about The Linus Connection, visit linusconnection.org or call Sabatini at 266-9305.
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