By Jane Schuchardt
Special to the Elgin Review
Just like a precious heirloom quilt, Elgin’s St. Boniface Quilters have stayed stitched together for a long, long time, 50 years to be exact.
To celebrate this milestone, mark your calendars for a Quilt Turning at 1:00 pm Sunday, September 27, 2026 at the Elgin Knights of Columbus Hall. Organizer Nancy Shavlik, Bartlett, plans for some 30 quilts to be folded back from a bed, each in turn, while a narrator tells the captivating story of each. Most of the quilts were made by the St. Boniface group with a selective few added from elsewhere. A dessert will be served.
Five local quilters gathered in the St. Boniface Convent building recently to recount days gone by with hopes of continuing what they do so beautifully – hand quilting.
Making a quilt is a multi-step process beginning with the selection of a pattern. Then there’s cutting and sewing fabric pieces together to make the top. This piece is layered with batting and backing, then stretched across a frame. The final step is quilting the layers together and binding the edges.
Shavlik said that while piecing continues in popularity, that last step of hand quilting, as compared to the now popular machine quilting, is nearly a lost art. Sitting around a soon-to-be 72 x 72-inch, multi-colored wall hanging provided by Margaret Jensen, Elgin, five women conversed nearly non-stop about everything except politics. At the same time they skillfully threaded tiny needles, pushed the thread in a running stitch through the layers with a thimble, and secured knots. Breaks only occur to take a necessary phone call or switch to a new thread color. It’s fascinating to see the stitch length about the same though done by different people.
The group has two main purposes – first, to complete the quilt that’s raffled off at the annual St. Boniface Thanksgiving Bazaar. The one for 2026, which Shavlik pieced, earned an open class blue ribbon at the Wheeler County Fair (where she resides) and now will be entered into competition at the Nebraska State Fair. The group put in 200 hours of quilting time on this piece and expects it to earn about $1,000 for the church.
The second priority is to prepare a wall hanging or a quilt of any size for every St. Boniface priest, based on his colors of choice. Once those two priorities are completed, the group is paid for hand quilting of pieced projects others provide.
Bernadine “Bunny” Coleman, Elgin, said that last year the group completed four quilts. “We’ve lost a lot of quilters,” she said. “It takes good eyesight and nimble fingers. What we can get done depends on the size, pattern complexity, and number of people available.” Money raised goes back to the church for electricity and other expenses to keep the quilting room available to them.
The group takes summers off, then meets every Tuesday usually 9:00 am – 5:00 pm from September through May with time away for lunch, generally at the Elgin Community Center. An afternoon snack break is accompanied by prayer, including gratitude for the women who started this group. New members, including those who wish to learn the skill, always are welcome.
The St. Boniface Quilters launched in 1976 as a neighborhood ladies club for those living southeast of Elgin. Mary Helen Schrage, Juan Hoefer, and Auralia Meis were among the early organizers. Since no one had a home large enough to block a quilt (sometimes as large as 120 x 120 inches), the St. Boniface Church basement was just the answer. Eventually, the group moved to the convent.
Shavlik and Jensen agreed that “Back in the day, there was no machine quilting. Most of the quilts were made for everyday use out of scraps of fabric.” Today, quilts often are priceless gifts to signify events such as births and weddings.
Quilting skills often are passed down from one generation to the other. For example, Patricia Spieker, Elgin, learned from her grandmother how to “do the sandwiching” as she called it of the bottom layer, batting, and pieced top. Then, it takes at least four people, one at each corner, to secure the layers to the frame. The quilters start on the outside edges and keep rolling the piece inward until their knees often touch while quilting the center to finish it off.
About quilting, Deb Hemenway, Elgin, with agreement from Spieker, said, “This is my relaxation therapy.” Jensen chimed in by lifting up the camaraderie – “Every stitch is filled with love.” “And friendship,” said Shavlik, “and nimble fingers,” added Coleman.
When it comes to a passion for hand quilting, these women are cut from the same cloth. This anonymous quote applies – “In the rhythm of the needle, there is music for the soul.”
