10 yo Girl makes blankets for children in need
Published: January 2, 2006
The fruits of Kaylyn York’s allowance sit neatly stacked in the upstairs sewing room — Scooby Doo and dinosaurs and frogs dressed like Elvis.
Each length of soft cloth will be trimmed and edged into a blanket, ironed, bagged and eventually given to a local child at a hospital or domestic abuse shelter or in need in some other way.
Kaylyn, 10, a fourth-grader at Park Road Elementary School in Pittsford, is part of an army of people nationwide who have sewn more than 1.4 million blankets since 1995 for Project Linus, an Illinois-based nonprofit organization that provides blankets for children. The project’s name, of course, is a reference to the iconic character of the Peanuts comic strip who always toted a blanket.
Kaylyn, the daughter of Jean and Frank York, started with Project Linus last spring after her mother taught her to use a serger, a type of sewing machine.
That came on the tail of donating roughly 100 stuffed animals from her voluminous collection to Beanies for Baghdad, a program founded in 2003 by a U.S. Army major in Iraq to provide stuffed animals and other donated toys to children there.
“I like helping people,” Kaylyn said. “I enjoyed (my stuffed animals), but I thought someone else would enjoy them more.”
Kaylyn was raised to appreciate her fortunate upbringing.
“I always look for projects she can help with,” Jean York said. But the Project Linus work was Kaylyn’s initiative alone. “She’ll say: ‘Let’s go buy the material. I want to work on a blanket.’”
“It’s easy to give away the clothes that don’t fit you, the toys you don’t play with,” York said. “But when you have to put your money into it, your own time into it, that’s the difference.”
Kaylyn sets aside a portion of her allowance for charity and uses it to buy the materials to make the blankets.
Each one takes just a few minutes to stitch and finish off, she said. Kaylyn signs the blankets in one of the rounded corners. And she places a small leaflet into the bag with the blanket. It says, “I hope you enjoy this blanket as much as I enjoyed making it for you, and that it makes you happy.” Next to that is a smiley face.
Then she and her mother take the batch of blankets to the Gates home of Lucille Arthmann, coordinator of Rochester’s Project Linus chapter.
Kaylyn is one of 91 area residents who turn out blankets regularly for the charity, Arthmann said, along with nine church groups, four senior citizen groups and the occasional school or Girl Scout troop.
Since the chapter started in 1998, it has delivered 6,648 blankets to children in such places as Golisano Children’s Hospital at Strong, Rochester General Hospital, Alternatives for Battered Women, Rochester Family Mission and half a dozen others, Arthmann said.
Kaylyn said she usually does the blanket work on weekends. “After school, I have lots of homework to do.”
She is starting on a new round of blankets after finishing up a batch of 26 just before Christmas. She does not expect to end her Project Linus work anytime soon.
“I just bought a ton of material,” she said. “That’ll last me for a long while.”
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