Busy, busy, busy…

Tags

burial gown, burial wrap, memory box

I’m pleased to report that we delivered a set of boxes on Monday to both the OB Floor and the ER at Decatur Memorial Hospital in Decatur, IL. This is a new hospital for Threads of Remembrance.

Tomorrow we will be delivering another set of boxes, burial wraps and pin sets to Crawford Memorial Hospital in Robinson, IL.

I’ve been in contact with a representative from OSF in Peoria, IL, and I believe that all OSF locations in Illinois may soon be welcoming a donation as well. Fingers crossed!

It’s been a busy month putting together the items for all these boxes, wraps, and pin sets. We’ve used up a LOT of supplies and are in desperate need of more knit/crochet blankets (sized 22-24 inches square). If you are handy with yarn, we’d love to receive some blankets from you!

I’m hopeful that we will be able to reach even more hospitals. If you know of a hospital that would benefit from our donations, please feel free to contact us!

Remembrance Ribbons

A few years ago, I posted a picture of a small blue ribbon with a heart charm saying that I was hoping to add these to the memory boxes. Until now, I’d not been able to include them due to the frustrating process of finding an efficient means of assembly for the pins and the need to design a card to hold them.

I’m pleased to announce that we will now be including the ribbon pins in addition to the mother’s bracelet!

As the picture above shows, there are three ribbons. The top one is just simple bow with a heart charm and is meant to be left with the child, perhaps in their tiny, precious hand. The bottom two bows are pins meant to be worn by the parents and/or family members. One has a tie tac back and one has a bar pin back. We will be providing blue and pink ribbons, as well as white ones for the gender neutral memory boxes.

I hope that these will provide a simple, yet meaningful, way for the the parents and family members to keep a connection with their lost child.

In the future, I hope to be able to provide a miscarriage version of the pins. The loss of a child through miscarriage is still the loss of a child. Here is an example of the miscarriage pins.

Next, I will be working on instructions and kits so that I can recruit other people in the assembly process. Hopefully, that process won’t take me another three years!

November Meeting

Anyone interested in helping with the project is welcome to come. No sewing experience is required; however, if you do sew, please bring your sewing machine to the meeting. We only have one sewing machine right now.

Below is the information for the next meeting:

Tuesday, November 17th Meeting
Location: The East Wing (210 E North Central Ave, Tuscola, IL)
Time: 6:30-8:30 PM

For more information, please email threadsofremembrance@gmail.com

In the News

This week the Effingham-Teutopolis News Report ran a story about Threads of Remembrance. Check out the image below…

News Gazette Article

Here is the link to the recent article that was published in the News Gazette: http://www.news-gazette.com/living/2015-02-26/putting-grief-work-help-others.html.

It is very exciting to have another opportunity to share our Mission with the community!

 

New Contacts and 14 Boxes Delivered

On Wednesday, November 19 we were able to meet with two representatives from Presence Covenant Hospital in Urbana. In addition to forming some important new contacts, we also delivered 14 memory boxes and 10 burial wraps. It has been well over a year since that hospital received any donations from Threads of Remembrance, so I am relieved to replenish their stock of boxes.

Both Presence representatives, one from the Foundation (Paul) and one from Pastoral Care (Dorey), seemed very excited to learn more about our mission. I was totally heartbroken to learn from Dorey that a family had lost a baby just a day before the meeting, and more so that no one was certain if the family had received anything, let alone a Threads memory box. Luckily, Dorey seemed to appreciate the value of the memory boxes and said she would make sure that the nurses were aware of what we can provide. I am hopeful that these new contacts will make it easier to keep Presence stocked with memory boxes!

I have also contacted Carle Hospital this week, and they requested nine more boxes. I am hoping to be able to deliver these boxes sometime next week. Thank you to everyone who came to the last meeting! Your hard work makes it possible to quickly fill the memory box requests from the hospitals. Maybe some day I’ll remember to take some pictures during a meeting.

 

A Little Speech and 19 Boxes

I was invited to speak to the Tuscola FCCLA (Family Career and Community Leaders of America) group last Wednesday. They are adopting Threads of Remembrance as one of their service projects for the year. I’m so excited to have these young ladies helping! One of these days I’m going to remember to take pictures at events like this so that I can share them, but, alas, Wednesday was not that day.

I also met with a representative at Sarah Bush last week and dropped off 19 memory boxes. The original contact retired, and the new one is very interested in helping get the word out about Threads of Remembrance to other hospitals in the area.

It is so fantastic to have all this help, and it is very appreciated!!!

 

Patterns, KAM Snaps, and a Sewing Machine

Tags

burial gown, KAMsnaps, micro-preemie, preemie

We mailed out the first sets of patterns for the gowns this week. I realized after showing someone else how to sew one that I did NOT follow the original directions and that I needed to tweak the actual pattern slightly. So, I embarked upon the adventure of redrafting the pattern pieces from scratch, rewriting the instructions, and taking the required pictures. This took much longer than I had originally expected, but I finally got it done. We have not yet determined if we will be charging a small fee for the pattern sets (to help cover the cost of printing and postage), but I will definitely post that information as soon as the Board has discussed the matter. I do have the patterns in a pdf format, however, some of the pieces are sized to 11×17 paper. If you are interested in obtaining a copy of the patterns in order to sew for Threads of Remembrance, please send an email to threadsofremembrance@gmail.com.

I’ve always been on a mission to find the easiest, least tedious manner of attaching the closures on the burial gowns. I’ve tried many things and have never been happy about any of the processes. Until NOW! I found something called KAMSnaps. These are nifty little plastic snaps that are easily applied with the use of a simple tool. SO simple! It was love at first sight. They make a size 14 snap (about a 1/4 inch) that is perfect. They aren’t even very expensive. I am thinking that we will request that all who sew at home simply leave the closure off of the completed gowns and then we will add the snaps at meetings. Perhaps in the future we can get enough of the tools that we can loan them out to our diligent sewing crew. Here’s a picture of what one of the gowns looks like with the KAMsnaps.

The new and improved closure discovery…KAMsnaps

An lastly, but certainly not least, we finally have a sewing machine for volunteers to use during our meetings. Due to generous public contributions, we were able to acquire this bad boy…

I haven’t had a chance to do anything other that take it out of the box, but if it is as nice as my own personal machine, no one will be disappointed! Can’t wait for the next meeting. Hope to see you there!!!

 

Fantastically Successfull Meeting!!!

A huge thanks to the 16 or so people who came to last night’s Threads of Remembrance meeting. We got a lot done! Excellent helpers assembled over 35 bracelet kits and around 20 completed bracelets. They unwrapped and labeled around 40 of the photo boxes, decorated a plethora of boxes for the bracelets, and cut out roughly 3 yards of material for the tiny burial wraps. I had planned to take some pictures, but did not…apparently I should have delegated that task.

I’ve had a great response to the newspaper articles and the WCIA newscast and am working to put together information and pattern kits to distribute. If you missed the newscast you can view it here: http://www.illinoishomepage.net/story/d/story/help-healing-with-threads-of-remembrance/32012/sPgidja4R0yfWd1AKrp2Fg. If we continue to get this type of response, I will definitely be able to add a couple of new hospitals to our list of memory box recipients. Great work everyone!!!

 

WCIA Newscast

I’ve been asked to do a live interview for the WCIA 5:00 pm newscast on Friday, May 9. I should be on around 5:10 pm. Tune in (or DVR it)!