paramedic – Quest Quilts

Like everyone else who owns and/or has touched a sewing machine in the last decade, I’ve been making masks for folks.

I’ll admit that a lot of times when I see Call-to-Arms posts circulating, I am very cynical. I’ve seen too many follow up posts where well-meaning people have made things worse instead of helping as intended. So when my sister, a talented paramedic, messaged me that, seriously, they were in need of masks to help extend the life of their n95s at the station, I got to work. I even called on my friends and other crafters to lend a hand if they hadn’t already. I’m so proud that, between us all, they were soon in good shape. The Walking Dead fabric was a huge hit, by the way, as was the Mario and blood splatter fabric. Gotta love that paramedic dark humor.

From there, I made some more and messaged a couple of former students who are now nurses. They said that they could use them in the ER at Egleston – a large children’s hospital in Atlanta. I’m familiar with this hospital for a couple of reasons. More recently, we took my daughter there a couple of years ago for some tests, but it goes even further back. My dad had leukemia when he was young, and Egleston helped him survive that. So I was happy for a chance to give back to them. And they did NOT get the scary zombie or blood fabric if you were wondering. Nothing but cute and simple fabric patterns for the children’s nurses.

After that, I made some and offered them to the other teachers in my school language arts department. And then my mom messaged me asking for a large order, over 40, to donate to her veterans group. I’m happy that those were finished up earlier tonight.

All this being said, the making masks adventure continues to be both exhilarating and draining. It’s exciting because it’s an active role in an otherwise helpless situation, so I’m happy to have some sort of control in that regard. It’s also draining because the need is so high that I can’t possibly keep up, and there’s so many conflicting articles out there about effectiveness, need, etc that one wonders why even try. Of course, this is nowhere near the amount of stress on those receiving the masks: ER nurses, paramedics, veterans. So I’ll hush on that note.

The first thing you need to know about my brother-in-law is that he is a fantastic fellow. The second thing you need to know is that he is a paramedic (and former firefighter). The third thing you need to know is that he is incredibly tall. If I’m correct, I think he’s around 6’7″. So when he wanted to know if I would make him an extra long quilt for his bed at the station, I agreed.

He asked for a Star of Life pattern which meant only one thing – reverse applique. I’d never done it before, but that didn’t matter too much. It was a quick study with the help of a projector. I simply traced it on to the blue fabric, cut out the snake design, placed white fabric behind it, and then I used a close-set zig zag stitch to bring it all together.

One unexpected perk of this quilt was my choice to use a white fabric with a nice sheen for the white base. I don’t remember why I had that huge cut of satin(?), but I decided to use it up for this quilt. My sister ordered some ambulance fabric that wasn’t too cutesy and had it sent to me. I used that fabric to add length to the quilt, especially as it needed to be extra long to suit my extra tall brother-in-law.

The next detail is my favorite. I added a red border to make sure it had a nice hang on the sides, and somewhere in there I thought about quilting in a heartbeat pattern in the red border! I had to make sure my research was solid on this because the last thing I wanted to do was quilt in a cardiac arrest into this man’s quilt. The rhythm ended up being easy enough, and I loved how it turned out.