Women Create Patchwork of Warmth for the Needy : Volunteerism: Group of 20 meets daily at Hawthorne church to make quilts for the poor. Seamstresses have produced 1,052 in a year.

Cleo Cecil, an 87-year-old great-grandmother, has spent more than two decades protecting the destitute from the cold.

Cecil is director of The Comforters, a group of about 20 elderly women who meet every Monday in Hawthorne’s Trinity Lutheran Church to make quilts for needy people--from Los Angeles riot victims to impoverished Ethiopians.

This is not your run-of-the-mill sewing circle. Consider the volunteer group’s annual output: a staggering 1,052 quilts since last October. For The Comforters, quilting is not merely a hobby--it’s a mission.

“It’s my calling,” said Cecil, a former Hawthorne elementary school teacher. “I think everyone is created to do something and it’s sometimes hard to find that thing. But I enjoy (quilting) and I’m helping others.”

When Cecil joined the group in 1972, the women--only a handful of them then--met once a week in each others’ homes, producing about 100 quilts a year. They draped the 5-by-8-foot quilts on card tables to work.

Since then, The Comforters’ production has surged, thanks to more volunteers, donated sewing machines and a large work space--the Trinity Lutheran Church’s Adult Ministry Center.

The results of that expansion were in evidence Wednesday, when a truck bound for a Lutheran World Relief warehouse in Minneapolis picked up cardboard boxes containing about 900 quilts.

The quilts will be stored until they are distributed. Church officials say the most recent recipients of their quilts have been poverty-stricken residents of Somalia. Other recent shipments have gone to Florida, for victims of Hurricane Andrew, and to India to assist programs organized by Mother Teresa.

Although many Lutheran churches have organized similar quilting projects, Bill Dingler, spokesman for Lutheran World Relief headquarters in New York, expressed surprise at the number of quilts the Hawthorne women have produced.

“They deserve kudos,” Dingler said. “That number is unusual for one congregation or group.” On average, he said, congregations send in about 200 quilts a year.

Cecil attributes the productivity to her group’s dedication and its ability to work as a team.

“For some it’s just a one day a week thing while others work during the week on quilting,” Cecil said. There is no pressure--the women come and go as they please.

Cecil and a few women in the group work at home during the week, sorting the fabric, marking and cutting the squares and sewing them to create the top of the quilt.

Caroline Ritch, the group’s 73-year-old assistant director, said she often puts quilting before housework.

At least once a week, she goes to a Gardena swap meet to buy used electric blankets, which she washes. She brings the blankets to the Monday meetings to use as padding for the center of the quilts.

“I never buy (blankets) that are more than $1,” Ritch said. “Sometimes I don’t find any, and other times I have found as many as 45 or 50.”

Ritch and Cecil also stock up on flat twin-sized sheets during white sales at local department stores.

“We rarely pay more than $3 a sheet,” Cecil said.

Although donations are what keep The Comforters alive, and the budget is sometimes tight, somehow there is always enough.

“We never beg,” Cecil said proudly, but “we’ve never run out of money.”

To reach the 1,000 mark, the women have sewn an average of 20 quilts every Monday for the last 12 months, meeting every week of the year except two.

Carrying brown-bag lunches, Cecil opens the doors of the Adult Ministry Center at Trinity Lutheran Church promptly at 8:45 a.m. With the exception of a short midmorning break and a 30-minute lunch followed by a brief prayer session, the women work diligently until about 3 p.m.

For those hours the large room resembles a factory, with the hum of sewing machines mingled with occasional conversation or laughter as the gray-haired women toil at their work stations.

Frieda Zindric’s favorite job is selecting the colored fabric for the face of the quilts.

Every week she picks pre-cut squares in her favorite hues and combines them with enough similarly colored solid or print squares to cover the top of a quilt. It takes 88 eight-inch squares or 165 six-inch squares to cover the twin-size quilts.

“I like to see how the quilts come out,” said Zindric, 66, who works part time at a Hawthorne thrift store. “And I’m always learning how to make them better.”

On Monday, she selected a stack of navy blue pre-cut squares. She scanned the material until a navy blue and tan print caught her eye. She nodded and quickly picked it up--but found it wasn’t enough. She studied the selection again and reluctantly picked up a bright yellow, navy blue and white print.

“I know this is kind of ugly,” she said, “but when you put them together, it works.”

After she selects the prints, Zindric arranges the squares on a long table, positioning them for sewing. She then picks them up in order and neatly bundles the stack for a volunteer to take home to sew.

Most of the quilt covers are sewn at home during the week.

The next step is to pin the covers to a full size sheet and blanket. This is an important step because all three layers of the quilt have to be smoothed out and anchored to each other or they might wrinkle.

Then the quilts go to one of about four or five women who sew them together.

Most of the women use donated machines, but Thelma Aronson, 80, is an exception. She says the modern sewing machines donated to the group scare her.

“I just can’t get along with these plastic creations,” said Aronson, a former bookkeeper. So every Monday she lugs in her 57-year-old black Singer sewing machine, sets it up beside the other machines in the back of the room and waits for the quilts to reach her table.

She doesn’t wait long. Sometimes the women produce them so fast they pile up to her waist, she said.

At the last stage of the assembly line are Audrey Roskam and Emily Fee, who tie three-inch strips of yarn to alternate squares to secure the layers of the quilts together. Then they fold the quilts and stack them. On Monday, their pile of completed quilts had grown to 21 by 2:30 p.m.

The Comforters did not set out to make more than 1,000 quilts, Cecil said, but as they got closer to the number, they were determined to reach it.

“If anyone said that this year we’d make 1,000 quilts, I’d have never believed them,” she said.