My Patient is Graduating High School, and I am Making a Graduation Quilt

My Whitney Young High School patient is graduating, and I am making him a graduation quilt. His family was told he would never live past the age of five, but obviously the doctors were wrong.

I love it when that happens!

My patient and I were told we were considered a “unit” in terms of obtaining tickets to the graduation. I thought it was super cute. My family made quilts for all types of occasions: graduations, birthdays, holidays, anniversaries, funerals, anytime in a person’s life milestone, really.

His family does not know I am doing this. It is supposed to be a surprise, but all of you look like trustworthy individuals, so I’m sure you’ll keep it to yourself (smile!).

The University of Chicago Lab School Community Quilt Project

My coworkers who knew about my job as a one-to-one nurse at Whitney Young High School, the 50^th anniversary yarn bomb and my volunteer work with school children involving community quilt projects that I had done for nearly 20 years told me, “Apply to Northeastern Illinois University for their teacher certification program.” I started the program in January 2026.

I found that my volunteer work with the University of Chicago Lab School was considered a service learning project in one of my teacher certification classes. I did my first presentation last night on Monday, April 20th, 2026 after I worked with my Whitney Young High School patient.

My 2026 service learning project was done at the University of Chicago Lab School. I am a member of numerous sewing circles and creative organizations, including, but not limited to, the Lakeside Quilt Guild. The Lakeside Quilt Guild donated fabric, sewing supplies and sewing books.

The University of Chicago Lab School decided in September 2024 that they wanted to do a community quilt project that was also an interdisciplinary lesson plan involving 1. math/geometry (tessellations), 2. visual art of quilting half square triangles and 3. English/writing.

Their first community quilt project took place from January 2025 to April 2025 and I also volunteered at the school during this time helping out with their community quilt project as I was still working as a one-to-one nurse at Whitney Young High School.

This was a volunteer project. I was not paid. I have done projects like this with school children in

Chicago for nearly 20 years. It was more important to me that the children have this experience. The only job I worked where I was paid was as a one-to-one nurse for my Whitney Young High School patient.

The first exhibition took place in May 2025 at the Gordon Parks Art Gallery. The University of Chicago Lab School decided to do their community quilt project again in 2026. It ended a couple weeks ago. The exhibition has not taken place yet as of the posting of this blog.

We worked with the students to create a community quilt project. The math teachers taught geometry. The visual art included equilateral triangles, which are triangles with three equal sides and each measuring 60 degrees.

We helped the students to create 6 inch by 6 inch half square triangle quilt blocks. These quilt blocks could be drawn over, painted over, hand embroidered over, applique placed on top or just left alone.

The class started with positive affirmations about being polymaths, which is a person with vast knowledge across multiple fields, hence an interdisciplinary unit lesson plan for a community quilt project comprised of geometry, visual arts and writing. The students were encouraged to use their knowledge to solve larger issues. They were told that two and sometimes three heads were better than one to come to the solution to a problem and that time and love conquers all because it does.

The students were then shown video profiles of deceased and living textiles artists. Music was played in the background. There was a hand quilting station, an embroidery station and a sewing machine station. The students were also encouraged to make a practice piece of a quilt block and a rough draft before creating a final quilt block and piece of writing.

Local textile artist Robert Earle Paige did come to the school and even created special fabric for this project through Spoonflower. I was taking an art class down the hallway from him when he was an Artist-in-Residence at the Hyde Park Art Center in Fall 2022.

I did create videos at my local library about how to sew a scant quarter of an inch, how to use a seam ripper as these were issues that came up with the teachers regarding the student’s progress. These videos were placed on the student’s padlets so they could view the information anytime they wanted.

When the community quilt exhibition is viewed, it is supposed to look like repeating tessellations of equilateral triangles.

The intended goal of this project, aside from teaching geometry, was the use of creativity to solve a problem. I shared with the class that there is a section of publishing known as medical writing. Years ago, I read in an anthology which contained personal essay titled “Dance and Medicine” by Dr. Danielle Ofri. The anthology contained personal essays written by doctors who shared how creativity helped them on the job to solve problems. Dr. Danielle Ofri was a dancer and doctor who was working during the beginning of the AIDS crisis in New York. Down the street from where she worked was a dance studio.

She noted that there was a large number of people coming into her job sick, but they simply did not know from what. She would go to this dance studio, dance in her classes, come back to work and said, “You know, this looks like a virus. We need to contact the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization to see if some medication can be created.”

It is not necessary to be on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine or even to win big awards. Art does help people solve real world problems.

I love my volunteer work.

At the end of the University of Chicago Lab School community quilt project, I was given a plaque with a half square triangle quilt block that had handwritten expression, “Thank you for your service!”