Passion for cross-stitch led to quilting

It started, as with many later-life passions, with empty-nest syndrome.

Teddie Egeline’s daughter, Katie, had grown up. She was in the Air Force now with a daughter and a husband, a fellow Airman, whom she married on base.

A long time cross-stitcher, Egeline walked into Sue Bee’s Quilting one day in 2011, inquiring about how to turn a cross-stitch she made for her granddaughter into a quilt. Mabel Edington, the vice president of the Kootenai Valley Quilt Guild, was aghast.

“Oh, no,” Edington said. “Something that nice you frame and pass through generations. If you want to quilt, start coming to classes on Tuesday.”

Like that, Egeline found a passion. In the time since she has made five quilt tops. Her most recent creation is “Flying Eagle.” Soon it will be sent to a United Services Organization center in Kaiserslautern, Germany, where an injured Airman will be wrapped in the quilt during a flight aboard a C-17 aircraft to Walter Reed Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

In the process, Egeline’s quilt will become one of more than 90,000 Quilts of Valor awarded to injured servicemen and women. Started in 2003 by a mother with a son in Iraq, the foundation connects quilt-toppers with machine quilters. Glenna Shaible performed Egeline’s quilting.

“I’ve had a longarm quilting machine for three years,” Shaible said. “In that time it’s been a passion of mine to give back and donate quilting for pieces going to veterans, children, breast cancer survivors, all sorts of groups.”

A career elementary school councilor, Shaible, 54, sees quilting as a means to her lifelong goal of giving back, even when she retires in six years.

“It’s nice to help people in need,” she said.

Privacy concerns make it unusual for quilters to receive pictures of their quilt being awarded. Only occasionally will quilters receive thank you notes from recipients. Still, Egeline plans to wrap a note of thanks with her email address inside her quilt.

“It’d be really cool if I hear back,” Egeline said.

In her correspondence with foundation Executive Director Susan Gordon, Egeline was forwarded a July letter sent from former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, thanking “all of your associates for their support.”

“I think that’s neat,” Egeline said.