KANSAS CITY, Mo. — If there’s one thing Jenny Doan knows about people who quilt, it’s that they care about people.
“Mr. Rogers says, ‘Look for the helpers.’ Quilters are helpers. Almost all of what they make, or at least a good percentage of it, goes to somebody else. Their houses aren’t loaded down with quilts, they’re giving them away,” Doan explained.
The Missouri woman is a kind of celebrity among the quilting community. Her YouTube quilting tutorials garnered so much of a following she created the Missouri Star Quilt Company in Hamilton, Missouri, which turned the small town about an hour north of Kansas City into Quilt Town, USA.
So when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Doan turned to YouTube again.
This time, she made videos explaining how to make cloth face masks. One with an elastic ties and one using fabric to tie the mask.
In a little over a month, the two videos combined have more than 2 million views. That’s more than an average quilting video.
“People really care about people. That’s one of the fun things I’ve seen happen over and over. People really care what happens to other people and they’re willing to work hard to make a difference,” Doan said.
Doan and her company are stepping up to the plate too. Her staff has made hundreds of masks which they’ve donated to hospitals, police departments, sheriff’s offices, and a nursing home in the northern Missouri region. The company has also donated enough fabric to nonprofits in the state to make nearly 20,000 face masks.
Doan closed her retail stores during stay-at-home orders and has yet to reopen them. She said she’s watching another tourist attraction for guidance on how to best reopen: Walt Disney World.
Her stores attract about 1,000 people per month from all over the world to Hamilton. Her fear right now is reopening too early, which could lead to COVID-19 spreading in the local community.
“We get people from all over the world coming here. So we want to make sure when people start coming, it’s safe for our community,” Doan explained.
In the meantime, the company’s online fabric store is open. Website traffic in March and April of 2020 is up nearly 25 percent compared to 2019. Doan said they’ve tracked more than 15,000 orders in the past two months going specifically to groups making masks.
Because of increased demand online, Missouri Star Quilt Company has not had to lay off any employees. They are mostly all working at the distribution warehouse to keep up with fulfilling online orders.
“Making masks, you become kind of essential when that happens, so we’re still selling thread, we’re still selling fabric, we’re still selling needles,” Doan said with a smile.
She is a quilter after all and she wants to do anything she can to help.
