Sewing Group Decks The Heads Of Newborns Deaconess Volunteers Make Caps And Stockings For Holiday Babies

Joan Morse unlocks the door to two modest, stale-smelling rooms in the lower levels of Deaconess Medical Center. This is HQ for this 60-year-old ex-Marine, who marshals a squad of ladies to continue work that’s been going on as long as she has.

The rooms are home to the Deaconess Auxiliary Sewing Guild, a benevolent force of needles and scissors, of stitches and cloth. The guild makes sure that every newborn babe of the holidays has a small, warm hat with bells and a Rudolph-red stocking for their first Christmas.

In these rooms, the 12 or so members of the guild meet once or twice a month to sew 125 stockings and 125 hats - enough to cover the estimated crop of the hospital’s holiday babies.

They also make quilts and afghans that go to children fighting off cancer or other diseases. They make things soft and warm for kids whose lives are anything but, while fighting with illness.

Morse has been doing this for 25 years.

“I’m a people person,” she said. “I’m always looking to make sure people are comfortable, especially children. They are the most vulnerable.”

In the early days of the guild - it started in 1940 - its members were physicians’ wives and the sewing was a social event. They made everything to clothe a newborn and its mother; pajamas, diapers, slippers and bibs.

“Now, so much of it is disposable,” Morse said.

And so, the guild sticks to several staples: quilts, afghans, stockings, hats and heads-up rolls - yard-long padded rolls (a couple inches in diameter) that are wrapped around the smallest babies.

“A little 2-pounder could snuggle right in there,” said Morse, as she bent one of the rolls into a circle.

Once upon a time, holiday newborns were actually put in the big-booted stockings the guild makes. That was also the era when mothers would cradle their babies in their arms while riding in the front seat of a car. Both practices have gone by the wayside. Now the stockings are just hung nearby.

“A friend of my mother knew I sewed. She said, `Just come once. I know you’ll love it.”’ Morse said. “Since then, I’ve given thousands of hours - joyfully.”

Morse has spent a good chunk of her life helping others. In the mid-‘70s, she helped disabled children with swimming lessons. She’s a big helper in Toys for Tots. During Christmas, she and her husband, Loren K., dress up as Mr. and Mrs. Claus for kids. She also looks after her 4-year-old grandson, Erik, whose mother died when he was a baby.

The offices of the guild are his sometimes playroom, while his grandmother sews.

Morse recruits for the guild, but she’s very particular. Candidates have to want to join for the right reason.

“It has to be a heart that is for others,” she said. “Not themselves.”

Though guild members don’t get to meet all the beneficiaries of their work, Morse has met many in her 25 years as a volunteer.

As she unfolds cloth, stories unwrap themselves from her memory: a little girl with cancer who always searched for a particular afghan while staying at the hospital; a boy, who years after getting a stocking from Deaconess, found some comfort in it as his father died of cancer during Christmas.

There are stories of the ones that didn’t make it and those that did. Morse handles them just like the cloth in her hands - with care.