Quilters rally to stitch Texas community back together one ‘hug’ at a time

VICTORIA, Texas — The quilt hanging behind Connie Kortz started as all quilts do. Dozens of fragments — 560, actually, in this instance — waiting for someone to stitch them together with patience and purpose. Patchwork pieces looking to be made whole. 

It’s called a “poppy” quilt, featuring seven rows of poppy flowers — those simple, four-leafed beauties that have long symbolized remembrance and peaceful sleep. This quilt, plus hundreds more like it, are heading to Texas Hill Country in coming weeks to bring those poppy qualities, plus comfort and warmth, to families who suffered devastating losses in the deadly July 4 floods.

‘What is a quilt, but a hug?’

Kortz isn’t a first responder. She’s not even a second responder, really. She’s a sewist and a quilt shop owner in the small Texas city of Victoria, about three hours southeast of flood-ravaged Kerr County. She watched in sorrow and disbelief as death and damage reports snowballed in the days after the Guadalupe River burst over its banks. 

Then, like the hundreds of people who’ve given time, money, provisions and prayers, she asked herself: What can I do to help?

And then: What can I do to help others help?

The answer was simple: In times of disaster, people need to know they are loved. They need to feel hugged. 

“And what is a quilt, but a hug?” she asked. 

So she began sewing. And sewing. And sewing. 

And then she began asking friends — and strangers online — to do the same. 

Within a month, she was part of her own snowball experience. Quilters from all across the country have shipped in more than 175 quilts to her shop to distribute to those in need. She has also received dozens of quilt tops waiting for batting, backing and binding. 

And Kortz expects thousands of poppy blocks to make their way to her quilt shop, My Fabric Friends.

The poppy block pile

The poppy block is a simple sew — all squares and rectangles, with 90- and 45-degree angles. One block requires stitching 15 different straight lines on a sewing machine. 

“Anybody can make this block,” said Kortz, who has posted several videos on YouTube and Facebook, demonstrating just how to do it. “I had a girl that came last Friday, hadn’t sewed in 35 years, and she sewed one that looked just as good as everybody else’s.”

Anyone who wants to participate can send in just one block, if that’s all they’re able to do. Each quilt top consists of 35 poppy blocks — seven rows of five. On Aug. 30, Kortz will host a 24-hour sew-along, during which people from across the hemisphere (yes, there’s at least one confirmed international participant in Canada) can join in to sew as many poppy blocks as possible. 

So far, Kortz has received more than 3,000 blocks — and counting. Though the counting is getting harder and harder to keep track of. 

A cross-country outpouring

When the mailman first started delivering packages of poppy blocks and quilts in various stages of completion early in July, he’d carry maybe three envelopes at a time into Kortz’s store. The stacks he shuttled in grew by the day. A half dozen one day. Maybe 10 the next. 

“Then he was bringing them to us by the box,” Kortz told her growing online following during a livestream the first Monday in August. She slid a white, corrugated United States Postal Service tote into the frame of her video. Max capacity: 70 pounds. “We started getting two of these boxes a day.”

Even that didn’t last long, she told her viewers.

“Today, when he came, he came in the front door and he brought a dolly,” she said. “A dolly!” 

The packages hail from all over: Conroe, Louisiana; Clermont, Florida; Chelan, Washington, where members of the Undercover Quilters Guild included a note to say, “We’re heartbroken by the events in Texas, and hope these blocks will bring comfort and love.”

When Kortz happened upon a small envelope containing just one poppy block from a woman in Tomball, Texas, she paused in reverence. 

“When y’all are making one block, it just is so touching that you are taking the time out of your life to do and send us one block,” she said. “One block.”

Buzzing with purpose

For most of its existence, Kortz’s little, side-street shop has been a quiet, calm oasis. Penny Decker, the shop’s manager, said there are times when 10 or 15 people will stop in all day. 

In recent weeks, there’s a frenetic energy in the air. Volunteers chat over the whir of sewing machines and the jingle-jangle from the string of bells positioned over the front door, trilling each time a new person enters. Dozens a day, now. 

The shop’s air buzzes with purpose as women flit and fly from one station to the next, measuring quilts, cutting fabric for poppy blocks or sorting mail. Kortz admits she is growing tired. Some mornings when she wakes, her whole body hurts. Others, she said, her heart feels so full she can’t register the physical pain from the day before. 

Decker keeps an eye on her — and the other volunteers who head home in the evening with sore wrists and tired feet. 

“A lot of people, they want to help,” Decker told SAN. 

“Some people can give money, some people can donate time, some people can rescue,” she said. “Quilters are just gonna quilt. It’s what we do. So everybody helps in their own way. This is just one way we can help.”

‘How do you help?’ 

And the help has poured in. 

On a Thursday morning in late July, Keri Graff and her 5-year-old daughter carried armloads of folded quilts into Kortz’s shop. 

“It’s like New York Fashion Week, but for quilts,” Lauren Walker said as Graff and Decker searched for an increasingly hard-to-find empty surface to set Graff’s quilts. 

Graff owned a quilt shop for 10 years before retiring in 2019. Now she designs quilt patterns and volunteers her sewing skills in the mission quilts group she started at her church, First Methodist in El Campo, Texas, a 12,000-person city about an hour’s drive northeast of Victoria.

“We wanted to do something,” Graff said. When she heard about Kortz’s “wonderful, wonderful quilt drive,” she pitched a plan to donate a dozen of her group’s recently-finished quilts.

“Yes!” her sister sewists said. “They’re going there!” 

It’s the latest donation dropoff in a long line. A couple of days earlier, Michelle Bailey, owner of the quilt shop Poppy Quilt N Sew in Georgetown, Texas, loaded four massive rolls of quilt batting into the back of her black SUV and dispatched her husband to drive them 150 miles south to Kortz’s shop. 

She’d seen one of Kortz’s posts online, alerting Texas quilters that the My Fabric Friends crew had hit a snag: They ran out of batting and faced a bottleneck at a key part of the quilting process. 

Bailey sent two rolls from her shop’s stash as a donation. Then she called Hobbs Bonded Fibers, one of the nation’s largest batting suppliers, and asked if she could send two more as a donation from the company. They agreed. 

“Everyone’s always wanted to help,” Bailey told SAN. “But it’s like, ‘How do you help?’”

Giving money is always an option, Bailey noted. But there is something about putting your hands to work, to overcome the helplessness of a situation as devastating as the floods that have affected her neighbors. 

“It’s the time and the thought that you put into it,” Bailey said. “There’s something about taking and transforming something that has been cut up, and putting it back together. It’s healing for the person doing it, and it’s healing for the person getting it.”

How To Help:

• My Fabric Friends is seeking donations of 12-inch “poppy block” quilt squares. Shop owner Connie Kortz explained how to piece the block in this video.
• Send finished poppy blocks to My Fabric Friends, 105 Cozzi Cir, Victoria, TX 77901.
• Kortz is planning to host a virtual, 24-hour poppy block sew along on Saturday, Aug. 30. She will share details about the event on her Youtube page, at https://www.youtube.com/@quarterinchofmagic.
• Quilts will be delivered to Hill Country on the third Saturday in September

Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief