Sisters quilter donates to fire department

Renowned quiltmaker Mary Dement Smith of Sisters has donated a quilt valued at $1,500 to the Cloverdale Volunteer Firefighters Association to help raise funds for equipment.

After seeing an article in The Nugget last fall about the volunteers' raffle of a rifle at the Sisters Rodeo, and the equipment that they purchased with those funds, Smith thought that she could use this as a way to support their organization.

Mary is a longtime quilter and lives in the Cloverdale Fire District.

Mary says the volunteers have been a great help to her family in the past, and it is comforting to know they will always be there when needed.

Smith has been a quilter for many years, and has in the past 10 years designed many landscape or pictorial quilts and quilt patterns. She and her late husband traveled to many quilt shows around the country and in Sisters as vendors selling her quilts, patterns, T-shirts, etc. She entered quilts in many of the shows, donated quilts to several organizations as fundraisers, and often received awards and ribbons on her quilts. She was the Featured Quilter at the Roseburg Quilt Show in 2009 and has won numerous prizes at the Pendleton Quilt Show Challenges.

Mary assembled the five-foot-square quilt over a period of approximately two months, and presented it to the firefighters on January 16 at the Sisters Library, where the quilt is currently on display during the Friends of the Sisters Library Art Show.

Tentatively, the firefighters plan to raffle the quilt during the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show in July. Raffle tickets will be available for sale after February 1 at the Cloverdale Fire District office (541-548-4815).

The volunteers tentatively plan to use the funds to purchase additional Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) to assign EMT/firefighters, enabling EMTs to respond to medical calls directly from their homes without having to first go to a fire station to pick up this lifesaving equipment.