She’s made 80 quilts in four months and yet shows no signs of stopping.
Todd DeatonViola Davis starting making quilts after a speaker from the Carolina Community Hospice told the Helping Hands senior citizens group of Sardis Baptist Church, Swansea, about a need the West Columbia ministry had for quilts. She knew it was something she could do.
“I feel like it is my mission,” explains Mrs. Viola, as she is known among her church family. “I’ve sewn just about all of my life.”
When she was a little girl of about 10, she started making clothes for her dolls out of paper bags. By age 14, she was making her own dresses. Through the years, she has made numerous quilts, many for her children and grandchildren.
It takes her about three hours to make one of the 42-by-36-inch quilts, she says. Friends from the senior adult group and other church members have donated some of the material; the rest she has purchased from local fabric stores, always keeping a sharp eye out for sale items.
She makes them in assembly-line fashion, four or five at a time, first cutting out the quilt tops or piecing scraps together, then adding batting and sewing on the lining. “They’re made not for beauty, but for service,” she humbly adds.
Whenever she get 10 or so made, she calls the hospice to arrange for someone to pick them up. “I’ve slowed down a little recently because I like to garden, too, and I am also painting my house and the porch swings.”
“I keep doing something all the time,” she chuckles. But just give the octogenarian a few idle minutes, and she is back at it, sewing yet another quilt.
Not all of the quilts are going to hospice, however. Her son, who manages a pizza restaurant, also works at a senior adult center in Myrtle Beach, and she has sent 36 quilts to residents there as well.
Mrs. Viola has been a member of Sardis Baptist Church since 1962, when she and her husband Melvin moved to Swansea. She grew up a Methodist, but when they moved to Norway, they joined Willow Swamp Baptist Church, where she was baptized in the Edisto River. She worked with her husband, pumping gas and running a service station, before his death in 1993. She has since substituted in the lunchroom at several local schools.
At Sardis, she has taught fourth and fifth graders in Sunday school for 47 years, and is still teaching. “I feel like I have to be in there with those children,” she says. “That to me is a blessing.”
“Mrs. Viola is a godly lady who has a heart for people,” observes her pastor, Dean Reynolds. “It doesn’t surprise me, to find out after the fact, that she sent quilts to hurting people.
“She is one who I suppose has done many things down through the years for those who are less fortunate,” Reynolds adds. “She is one of our most loved and respected members because of her Christlike spirit.”
But for Mrs. Viola, “Quilting is just something the Lord would like for me to do. It’s such a blessing for me, and I feel like I’m helping somebody” – along the Way.