Unexpected Joy

The first thing that I can remember making on a sewing machine was a teddy bear. I was seven years old.

When I was three, my mother’s great-aunt Minnie died, and one of the things my mother inherited was a Dixon treadle sewing machine. My father motorized the machine, and I was mesmerized watching my mother sew. When I begged to be taught to use the machine, my mother bought a pre-printed teddy bear panel: a piece of cotton fabric that was printed with all the pieces (and instructions) needed to create a teddy bear. All you had to do was cut it out and follow the instructions.

I remember the feel of the heavy scissors that I needed to use to oh-so-carefully cut the fabric, so different from the small scissors I used to cut paper. I remember it taking a long time to cut out all the pieces: this was no simple two-sided creature. In addition to the main body and head, it had pieces for arms, legs, ears, and a snout as well as a pair of green gingham overalls.

I named the toy “Ginger Bear,” and slept with it every night for many years. I found such great comfort in holding the foam-stuffed bear close to my face that its face gradually became worn and was eventually a patchwork of closely sewn seams to keep the stuffing in. I made that bear 67 years ago, but his now-fragile body is still carefully stored in my closet.

I hadn’t thought much about Ginger Bear until the summer of 2020. My partner and I had been in quarantine for several months, and the inactivity was starting to get me down. Even though we are both retired, I enjoyed making items to sell at local craft fairs, volunteering with Project Linus (an organization that donates handmade blankets to hospitalized children) and at the local arboretum, learning Spanish for fun with a group of retirees, going out to lunch once or twice a week, and traveling to spend time with friends and family or to visit a new country. Like everyone else, we had no idea how long we would need to be in quarantine, and I found myself getting depressed. I had a list of things I could do: Reorganize the kitchen, paint the mailbox, pull weeds, read all the letters my parents wrote to each when my father was overseas during WWII, organize the sewing room, give our home a thorough cleaning, shred years worth of old credit card statements and utility bills, and so on and so forth. But I would wake up in the morning with no desire to do anything except go back to sleep.

And that’s when I started thinking about Ginger Bear. How as a child, when I was sad or lonely, I would lie in bed and hug Ginger Bear, and somehow that had made me feel better.

That thought led me to think about all the children who were going through quarantine without the company of their schoolmates and playmates, and then one step further led me to focus attention in my thoughts on children who were in the hospital or living in homeless shelters or going through some other type of trauma. Trauma on top of a pandemic? And happening to children? That just seemed to me to be too much of a problem to ignore.

I reached out to the local coordinator for Project Linus to see if she knew of an organization that would distribute stuffed animals to children in difficult circumstances, and her response was a resounding “Yes!” Suddenly I had a mission: I was going to make small stuffed animals that I hoped would provide some joy to an unhappy child in difficult circumstances.

A local furniture store started donating all of their discontinued fabric samples to me for this project (keeping all that fabric out of a landfill is an added bonus), I ordered 20 pounds of fiberfil, and I started scouring the Internet for patterns for simple stuffed animals.

To date I have made 277 toys, and they have gone to children hospitalized at WakeMed (Raleigh, North Carolina) and those living in homeless shelters in both Raleigh and Durham. They have been added to Hospice welcome bags, accompanied new beds provided by the nonprofit Sleep in Heavenly Peace, and been given to homeless children housed in motels thanks to the nonprofit Passage Home.

Somewhere along the way I read an article about endangered species, so I started a secondary project. I have made more complicated stuffed animals representing endangered species such as the black rhino, the narwhal, and the marine iguana. I sell those toys through my Facebook page and donate the proceeds to the World Wildlife Fund.

Although arthritis in my hands has slowed my productivity with the stuffed animals, my motivation to do something useful hasn’t lagged. I can still crochet, so with the help of my Fiskar’s perforating rotary cutter I have started to crochet edging on pieces of fleece to make blankets for Project Linus. Thanks to donations of fabric to Project Linus, I will shortly finish edging my 50th blanket.

For many, life has begun to return to a semblance of pre-pandemic normalcy; but for me, I resume that life accompanied by a new sense of purpose and meaning. As we move into the future, the creative work I’ve come to cherish will continue. Fifteen months of quarantine, with all the accompanying health risks and fears, was an unexpected burden that somehow became an unexpected source of joy and fulfillment.