According to Phyllis Carey, facilitator of the Washington Peninsula/Sequim Chapter of Project Linus, 90-year-old LaRue Robirts “finds joy in doing for others and being able to keep up with her quilting and gardening.”
Project Linus is a national organization with local chapters that dedicate themselves to providing blankets – quilted, fleece, flannel, knit or crochet – for local children in need.
Robirts is one of about 200 active members of the local Project, ranging in age from the children of Girl Scout Troop 41492 in Port Townsend to 101-year-old Grace Torrence.
Robirts, who turns 91 soon, has contributed more than 1,400 quilts to the Project, according to her own tally.
Those quilts are just a fraction of what she’s produced in her lifetime, she explained.
“I used to make big quilts and then hand quilt them because I wanted to make sure all my kids had one when they got married.”
Sequim Gazette photo by Emily Matthiessen Robirts shares a quilt she made from pieces of her six children’s clothing. Many of the clothing items her children wore were made by her. The mushrooms were embroidered by her daughter on a pair of jeans. Robirts says she saves and uses scraps as much as possible.
Wedding quilts and childhood quilts for children, great grandchildren and a great-great grandchild were just some of the detailed quilts she has done them for over the years.
Robirts said she has been a member of Project Linus for about 25 years, “but I just kind of did a few at a time. After my husband died 10 years ago, why then I just really started sewing. It gave me something to do. And of course, I like to sew.”
In the summer, she said, she has “yard work to do, so I don’t get that much done” on the quilts. Robirts does most of the work around the house and outside herself.
“I gotta be busy, and I get tired of watching TV and the newspaper don’t take that much time to read,” she said. “I put in a good two to three hours every day in the winter sewing.”
Although a seamstress since she was five or six, making doll clothes on “the old treadle machine,” these days she sews only quilts.
“I used to crochet and embroider and all of them, but when I got more into quilting, I thought, ‘I don’t have room for all that yarn and material, too.’ So I got rid of all the yarn and stuff. Just went to material.”
Robirts said she lays awake at night imagining future quilts.
“So much fabric and so little time. That’s how I got so many quilts I want to make in my head, you know?”
Family influences
Robirts’ home and work ethic reflect early examples in her family.
“My dad was a blacksmith and mechanic,” said Robirts, explaining that he was stricken with polio at age five. “He worked 10 hours a day, six days a week, and four on Sunday, with being (disabled).”
She said they had a gas station in their small southeastern Idaho town, where he “did a lot of blacksmith work for the farmers, sharpening plowshares and hay knives and stuff like that, and welding. And he worked on cars.
“Mom was a good starter, but she never finished anything. She wasn’t one for housework. She spent a lot of time over at the shop.”
It was a great-aunt who inspired Robirts to her lifelong passion.
“I’ve always been interested in quilts, because she gave us one that had the big Texas star in the center. I can still remember it.
“That first quilt I made, I was just a kid, and I sewed a bunch of squares together and I tried quilting it by hand. My great aunt came from Salt Lake, and because she was an excellent quilter she showed me how to quilt. She did a little on it, but it was a pathetic thing for a quilt.”
Sequim Gazette photo by Emily Matthiessen Robirts made this quilt for her now-deceased husband from T-shirts and other memorabilia he loved. He was a big fan of Lehman’s store.
Sixty-two years of marriage
At age 18 Robirts married 19-year-old Dale, home on leave from the Navy. Their courtship was brief but they’d known each other since childhood.
After she finished school and he went into the reserves, they were able to live together as husband and wife and “I said, ‘I ain’t living in my hometown and I ain’t living in your hometown,” Robirts said.
The couple moved to Spokane, where they lived for 40 years before moving to Sequim in the early ’90s.
Before retiring, Dale spent 30 years as a mechanic – or a “millwright,” as Robirts said they were called – for Kaiser Aluminum. Robirts gave birth to six children in eight years and handmade their clothes.
She was also “growing a garden and sewing and stuff. Of course we was always busy. The three boys went through Scouts, and I was a Campfire leader. I look back now and I don’t know how I did it, but you just do what you have to do.”
Project Linus
“So I just keep on sewing,” said Robirts. “When they had a birthday party for me in March, I let all my great-grandkids pick out a quilt because they’ve all had one when they were babies, so that they had their names on them and stuff. But these that I make for Linus, I don’t sign them or anything. They sew a little tag on them.”
Organizers with Project Linus say they “strive for warmth!” They know, as does Robirts, that life can be hard for children facing adult-sized problems. Sending a blanket to a child is a message of love, shown by the care and expertise that goes into it.
Robirts said the quilts she makes for Linus are about 42 inches wide. “I try to keep it so I can get it on just a width of material, and then I make them from 48 to 72 inches long,” so that big children can have them, too. She said she makes them simple and durable, made up of triangles or squares.
“I make somewhere between 10 and 20 tops,” she said. “And then I figure, ‘Oh, I gotta put them all together.” That’s her least favorite part, she explained.
“Then I work on the quilting part.”
The time put into each quilt is difficult to quantify, she said. “Depends on the pattern of the tops, how much time it takes.”
She briefly detailed the process. “You have to stretch out your backing, and then you put your batting on top of that. Then you got to stretch out the top. And then you pin it all. A lot of people baste it, but I pin mine, and then I take it in and sew it. And then you got to bind it. You got to press it in between.”
Robirts said that for her 90th birthday she treated herself to a wonderful new sewing machine, with a guide for the fourth inch seam. Her sewing room is bursting with fabric, and she said the Project Linus headquarters is similar.
“It’s so full of material you can’t hardly get in the door.”
Robirts credited Carey with this development. “She’s a great lady, she works with everyone. Before Phyllis got started, you had to buy your own material and everything. I used to go to the thrift store and shop for material.” Now, “People donate material and thread and all kinds of sewing stuff.”
According to Robirts, a lot of volunteers used to give up quilting for Linus “because they said they couldn’t afford to make them anymore. That’s when we had to buy the material stuff. And if you’re on a limited budget, that’s pretty hard, because they do get expensive.”
“We have amazing volunteers and the success of our group would not happen without each of them,” Carey said.
Robirts “is an absolute inspiration,” she said, “always willing to share her knowledge with us.”
According to the Project Linus website, volunteers don’t have to know how to sew, knit or crochet. The organization will teach them those skills, or they can help in other ways.
“We can use help with cutting fabrics to make kits, organize material that has been donated or even help gathering donations,” said Carey.
According to Carey, quilting classes take place on the third Friday of most months at the Gardiner Community Center.
“If we don’t have a class planned we will be making scrappy quilts,” she said. “Materials will be provided but they must bring their own sewing machine and cutting tools.”
She said they will be learning pinwheels in January and attic window panels in March.
For members of Project Linus, the quilts aren’t just about physical warmth but emotional warmth as well.
Project Linus WA. Peninsula/Sequim Chapter operates out of a business front at 33 Valley Center Place in Carlsborg from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Sundays, and 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Visitors can pickup or make donations of fabrics, yarn, thread, batting and other miscellaneous materials.
Donation sites can also be found at Loop N Stitch, 61 Hooker Road, Sequim; A Stitch in Time Quilt Shoppe, 225 E. Washington St, Sequim, and JOANN Fabrics, 150 Safeway Plaza, Port Angeles.
All donations are tax-deductible.
For more information about Washington Peninsula/Sequim Chapter of Project Linus, contact Phyllis Carey at mrstc@embarqmail.com or visit wplinus.org/.
Sequim Gazette photo by Emily Matthiessen Robirts shows the top of a child’s quilt that she will give away after completing. Behind her, in her sewing room, stacks of cloth await her hands.
