Sewing With Nancy

cc When sewing or quilting for a community service project you can find projects to make that are large or small. Today's Nancy's Corner guest will show us that something very small a six-inch or less tall doll is very meaningful to women in domestic abuse shelters plus it gives us hints on how we can help others. Please welcome Brenda Hutchings who joins us via Skype. Nice to see you, Brenda. Hi, Nancy, nice to see you, too. Brenda, you have such a fascinating story to tell about the comfort doll project. Tell us how it started. The comfort doll project started with Pat Winters in 2007. She's a crazy quilter and she sent out dolls to domestic abuse shelters. Online crafters sent dolls to her and she would then send them out and adhering a tag to them. She had to close the project. I saw it online, let's see, in January 2010. She closed it in December, 2009. I saw it online and I'm like, okay, maybe I should do this. You can do it, right. I saw where her last donation went to and I'm like, okay, I'm in My brother lives there, let's do it. These dolls can be any size, any shape. But the size is important. Really, the size is important and actually, you can't go too small. What comes across is the love and care that each person puts into it. The reason for the size is that we want the people receiving them to be able to carry them around with them stick them in their purse and be able to get that tactile feeling that comfort from holding onto this doll. You have a pattern on your website that you can make these cute little dolls and our viewers can see that now. They can be made very simply. There a couple sizes on your site, correct? Okay, on the site, we have a pattern from Sew News that Lucy Blaire designed. You can follow that. You can reduce the pattern. Just put it on a copy machine and take a reduction of say, 70%. That'll just size everything down for you. Also, I have a couple of patterns and hope to add more patterns as I go to give variety, so people have more to choose from. We have an image of a really artsy doll. It looks very clever, and very adult-like. For a woman to feel comfort I think it's important that it isn't looking especially childlike here. This is a fun doll. People can send the dolls to you but you have another suggestion for us. Tell us about that. Really, what would be great is local. This is all about humans reaching out to other humans communities to their own communities. So if you have a local shelter you can have a sewing group, or just yourself. If you'd like to make 12 dolls, ten dolls, three dolls whatever you'd like to do. Just take them to your local shelter. They would love them. So, community to community, giving back within your own community would be great. You mentioned to me the other day that the postage, by the time they send the doll you'd rather have them donate money to the community shelter in their area. Right, the postage is outrageous. I understand. It's wonderful to see them coming in to me because you feel like you're-- It helps the person making the doll to feel like they're part of something really big. I'm happy to take them and pass them on. Also on my site, I have a card that you can copy. Feel free to use it and attach it to your dolls and take them to your local shelter. It talks about the comfort doll and what the purpose of this is. Brenda, thank you for picking up the doll project and carrying it forth. You've had almost 2,000 dolls made and distributed. It's exciting. Yeah, we got that this year, and it was wonderful. Thank you so much for having me on. You're welcome. If you'd like more information on the doll project you know that all things Sewing with Nancy are on are website at nancyzieman.com. You'll also be able to read our blog online and sign up for social media at nancyzieman.com. You'll be able to go to Nancy's Corner. At Nancy's Corner, all our guests are listed there so you can find their websites and find out more about how you can become involved in sewing and quilting by giving away your talents and enjoying the process as well. Well, this program of "Circles Sew Simple" ends our 30th Anniversary season on Sewing with Nancy. I thank you for joining us this season. Thank you to my special guest, Donna Fenske for joining me on this program.

And as I say with every program

Thank you for joining me. Bye for now.