Linus Blanket project spreads to Milford

When Julia Sullivan looked tearful as she answered a phone call at work recently, her co-workers wondered what was wrong.

Sullivan explained that a woman and her young daughter had called to thank her for the handmade blanket and prayer shawl they were given by her chapter of Project Linus after the death of the girl’s brother in Afghanistan.

Sullivan, of Shohola, is still not inured to such interchanges after giving out 30,688 blankets made by chapter members over its 15 years of service to people going through illness or loss, particularly children. She does it as coordinator for the Orange and Pike County Project Linus chapter she began in 2001. The chapter meets monthly at Wallkill Community Center, but in Pike County, members meet for lunch in churches, clubs and schools. Blanket-making volunteers have included Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, assisted living center residents and prison inmates, as well as other adults and youth. Some blanket makers knit and crochet; others use Crayola fabric markers to decorate squares that are joined to make a blanket.

Sometimes a child who once received a blanket becomes a blanket maker. One such blanket-making 4-H member, now about 9, was sent by Medevac to Westchester neonatal intensive care when she was born. A Project Linus blanket covered her isolette to protect her from light. When she went home, the blanket went with her.

“If the baby doesn’t survive,” said Sullivan, “rather than being presented to parents in a standard hospital blanket, the baby is wrapped in a handmade Linus blanket that takes on the baby’s smell for parents to keep.”

Batches of blankets are left at Bon Secours Community Hospital emergency room, as many children are walk-in patients, says Sullivan. Blankets also go to military grief camps in Texas and West Virginia for siblings of dead soldiers.

Sullivan and her chapter also respond impromptu to all kinds of situations where blankets might help. When the clerk at a shipping store counter asked Julia Sullivan if she could buy a blanket like the multi-colored crocheted piece she helped Sullivan wrap for a friend having cancer surgery, Sullivan told her blankets are for donations not sales. But finding that the woman’s house had burned down, leaving little for her and her children, blankets were donated to the family.

From leftover scraps, which would otherwise go to landfills, volunteers make dog and cat beds for animal shelters; Sullivan also donates triangular prayer shawls she makes.

When Sullivan was a child learning to crochet and knit from her grandmother, she made doilies and handkerchiefs. After she married, she made sweaters and scarves for her family. Then one day she was watching Oprah Winfrey’s television show and saw a segment about Karen Loucks, who began Project Linus in Colorado in 1995. She had read about a child going through chemotherapy aided by a special blanket. The organization, powered by volunteers, has donated more than three million handmade blankets. Peanuts cartoon creator Charles Schulz allowed the nonprofit to use the name of his eternally blanket-toting character, Linus, without royalties.

“I logged the information in the back of my brain,” Sullivan said. “Then I contacted the national office about starting a chapter. You have to be approved.”

An accountant by profession, Sullivan notes that the organization is run by two couples and spends only about 7 percent of its funding on administration.

Sullivan was then living in Orange County, but when Sullivan moved to Shohola 10 years ago, she expanded the chapter to include Pike County. Health organizations in Milford are now considering both incorporating blankets in their services and providing space for groups to meet and make them. Sullivan hopes to begin having monthly meetings in the community room of the Milford branch of Pike County Public Library in the spring.

To volunteer or contribute, call 845-692-2536 or 570-775-0539 or visit orgsites.com/ny/projectlinusocny.

Meetings take place every month at the Wallkill Community Center, 8 Wes Warren Drive in Middletown, N.J., including March 7, April 7 and May 2 and throughout the year.