PATTY FEDERIGHI KNOWS you can make soup from a stone and mend the tears of the world one piece at a time.
Federighi is a Seattle quilt designer whose volunteer work led her to an African country decimated by civil war.
On Wednesday, Sept. 21, she will be the guest speaker at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church’s soup supper to tell the story of how a quilting ministry called Peace Through Pieces came together.
It all began when someone saw quilts that Federighi had designed at a quilt show and asked her to volunteer for Stone Soup, an organization that makes quilts for people undergoing treatment at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Federighi, whose sister had died of leukemia, followed the inclination of her heart, she said, and accepted.
Her job: to take the mountains of donated material and create quilt designs that, packaged with the fabric, were distributed as kits to church quilting groups and other volunteers who make the quilts.
Each is 5 feet by 6 feet, a good size for patients to use as a wrap or blanket when undergoing chemo.
But the quilts turned out to be therapeutic for the people who made them as well as the people who received them.
“We kept getting these notes saying, ‘I have finally come to grips with my own cancer,’ or ‘After doing this, I was finally able to grieve for my mother,’” Federighi said.
“I thought, ‘There has to be a wider application for this.’”
There was. Federighi belongs to the North Seattle Friends Church, which in 2005 hosted a regional meeting of the international Friends World Committee for Consultation.
The keynote speaker was David Niyonzima of Burundi, director of Trauma Healing and Reconciliation Services (THARS).
Niyonzima spoke on THARS work, which includes setting up safe houses and support groups for women who have been raped and are ostracized by their families and communities.
Niyonzima had attended George Fox Evangelical Seminary in Portland, Ore., and was in the United States to bring his 15-year-old daughter, Daniella, to college.
After he went home, Daniella stayed and visited friends of the family in Oregon who are counselors.
“They found that the girl was as traumatized as anybody else and contacted Carolann Palmer at our church,” Federighi said. “They thought she would benefit from receiving a quilt.”
Palmer, the author of five books on quilting, took the request to Federighi.
That same morning, Federighi, whose work had evolved into a part-time job as director of quilting ministries at her church, attended the weekly prayer meeting with the pastor and elders.
“As we were praying, the idea of quilting as healing for trauma, both in the making and receiving, was born,” Federighi said.
Federighi emailed Niyonzima in Burundi, telling him what had happened during the prayer time.
She was full of questions, but what tipped the scales was when she asked if there was any cultural significance to making quilts in Burundi.
“I didn’t want to take one more Western custom to another country and imply that we are the experts,” Federighi said.
“He told me that in Burundi, when someone is sick or grieving, friends and family come to visit them and bring a blanket.
“If you don’t bring a blanket, they think you don’t love them.”
Knowing there was already a tradition, Federighi felt the idea had a green light.
At the program at St. Paul’s, she will talk about her first trip to Burundi in January 2006 to meet with women in the support groups and ask if they wanted to learn quilt-making.
She will also show slides of the return trip she and Palmer made to conduct quilt-making workshops for 16 students, two representatives from eight support groups.
Improvising the pattern
When she had the opportunity to return to Burundi two months later, Federighi found that the quilting groups the women had started in their communities had already used almost all the material they had been given and were improvising on the basic pattern, which was fine with Federighi.
“I didn’t want them to look like our quilts,” she said. “I wanted their choices of colors and patterns to have an African sensibility.”
Federighi set up a second workshop in 2008, training the two best quilters from the groups to do the teaching.
Two teachers were from the pygmy ethnic group, she said, which has no social status or access to education.
Some of the students made remarks at the start of the workshop but by the fourth day asked to have a class meeting, where they formally apologized to their teachers.
“It’s not just making quilts,” Federighi said. “It’s helping to heal the ethnic conflict.”
Federighi has made five trips to Burundi and has another trip planned for February to offer advanced quilt-making techniques.
She has also started the Peace Through Pieces quilting ministry in the Congo, where the war is still going on, as part of trauma healing training by THARS.
Federighi said it’s not her forte, but she also preached in the Congo because that’s what visitors are expected to do.
Her topic: doing what God calls you to do.
“I told them you don’t have to have a Ph.D. in psychology to do healing therapy,” she said. “I told them you don’t have to have been to seminary to do God’s will. Just doing what people do can be a tool of the kingdom.”
Beth Cahape, a Port Townsend resident who was a Vista volunteer at a quilt co-op in West Virginia, suggested that Federighi be invited to speak at St. Paul’s.
The Wednesday soup supper Sept. 21 starts at 6:30 p.m., with the program at 7 p.m.
For more information, phone Karen Pierce, deacon at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, at 360-385-0770.
The church is located on the corner of Tyler and Jefferson streets across the street from the old fire bell tower overlooking the bay.
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Jennifer Jackson writes about Port Townsend and Jefferson County every Wednesday. To contact her with items for this column, phone 360-379-5688 or email jjackson@olypen.com.
