Jamestown Quilters Guild Welcomes Beginners, Veterans With Decades of Expertise

Beth Cole can do the math. As secretary of the Jamestown Quilters Guild, she totals up the decades her roughly 32 fellow members have spent at the needle and arrives at a number that stops people: hundreds of years of combined quilting expertise, all available to anyone willing to walk through the doors of the Gladstone Inn and Suites on a second Thursday.

"We welcome beginners and experienced quilters and everything in between," Cole said. "We've got many, many years, many hundreds of years, of expertise in the quilting industry to help someone that's just starting out."

The guild meets monthly from August through May, and president Ginny Kleven is quick to dispel any image of a passive hobby club. "We're very active, we don't just sit and quilt," Kleven said. The guild's charitable footprint backs her up.

Members produce Quilts of Honor for area veterans, a program that pairs handmade quilts with individual service members nominated by their communities. The guild has also assembled "Hug a Daddy" pillows for children whose parents were deployed and "Snuggle and Read" quilts tied to family literacy efforts. Each project connects the group to a different corner of the Jamestown community: veterans' organizations, schools, and families navigating military deployment.

Members come from Jamestown and the surrounding region, and annual dues run $20, a figure that reflects the guild's emphasis on accessibility over exclusivity. Anyone interested in joining can show up on the second Thursday of any month, August through May, at the Gladstone Inn and Suites.

Veterans' advocates and local organizations can also nominate a service member to receive a Quilt of Honor through the guild, making it an established and practical channel for community recognition of those who served.