CAPE WOMAN TAKES PART IN MILLENIUM QUILTING ENDEAVOR

This week Debra Rau of Cape Girardeau will mail 80 packages. Each package will contain 80 plastic bags filled with 25 three-inch squares of different fabrics.

A little calculating reveals that's 160,000 squares of fabric Rau is sending out as she coordinates a quilt square exchange among 80 people so all will be able to make a millennium quilt.

"The whole idea is to make a quilt using 2,000 squares, with each square a different fabric," Rau said. It's also fun to get those pieces from as diverse a group of people as possible.

Rau talked as she sat in the home of her parents, Jewel and Fred Eggley, who allowed their daughter to fill their dining room with boxes overflowing with packets of quilt squares waiting to be mailed out in the exchange.

Rau, a child psychologist at Midwest Center for Professional Counseling in Sikeston, learned about millennium quilts from an Internet site called World Wide Quilting Page (ttsw.com/MainQuiltPage.html), where there is a chat room just for people who want to swap fabrics.

In fact, Rau thinks it would be next to impossible to gather 2,000 different pieces of material without the help of the Web.

"My mother has been quilting since 1973," Rau said." She cuts a four-inch square from every piece of fabric she gets and she's only got 400 pieces, but by swapping online, you have access to so many more people."

For the swap Rau has been coordinating, the first step was finding 80 people who wanted to participate. Five, including Rau, are members of the local River Heritage Quilters Guild. The rest Rau met online in a Quilting Page chat room. They include people from every state, as well as from six other countries, including England, Scotland and Japan.

Each of those people, including Rau, then got 25 different pieces of fabric, each about a yard long, and cut each into 80 three-inch squares. Those squares were then sorted into 80 piles of 25 squares, with one sample of each fabric in each pile. Each pile was then put in separate plastic bags.

"That was very time-consuming," Rau said.

All those packets were then sent to Rau for the exchange.

"Every day for weeks, I'd get one, two, sometimes three packages of fabric," Rau said. "I felt so bad for the mailman I bought him a cake."

With two young children, Madison, 6, and Sierra, 2, Rau didn't want to leave that many tiny pieces of fabric lying around her house. So she took the boxes to her parents' home.

Besides giving up their dining room for a few weeks to the piles of boxes, Rau's parents also helped her sort those 6,400 packets to give each of the 80 participants one packet from each participant so each would end up with 2,000 different pieces of fabrics.

"My dad built a filing system 12 feet long with hanging files so we could sort through all these packets," Rau said. "It was fun, but overwhelming."

Once she gets all those packages mailed this week, the only thing Rau will have left to do is put together her own millennium quilt.

"But it's my understanding that the millennium won't start until 2001, so I've got lots of time," said Rau, who gets up early each morning so she'll have time to sew on her quilts before her husband, Dan, and children wake up.

She wants to take her time to figure out the most pleasing way of piecing together those 2,000 squares of fabric.

"The pattern you use is up to the individual," said Rau, who has been machine quilting for about two years. "But most people work in a way to use the signed squares."

Signed squares are a solid colored square of fabric signed by the participant and often with a drawing on it that is included in each pack of 25 squares.

A couple from Washington, the Evergreen State, drew a small evergreen tree on their signed square. A woman from Ocala, Fla., included an outline of Florida on hers. A 9-year-old California boy, who Rau said is the youngest of the 80 participants, put a drawing of a sewing machine on his signed square.

Rau said she won't be organizing another swap, but those interested in making a millennium quilt can still find people to exchange fabric with in the chat room on the World Wide Quilting Page.

The Web site even has an online catalog where you can buy the 2,000 squares. Cost is $250.

After coordinating the exchange between 80 people, Rau said that price is justified.

"This was really a massive undertaking," Rau said.

Still, she's glad she did it, mainly because of the people she met online.

"Even though these people may live thousands of miles away and you never physically meet them, you still feel like you know them," Rau said.

And getting to know other quilters is the reason Rau got into quilting two years ago.

"This sounds corny, but quilters are all such nice people," Rau said. "There seems to be some correlation between having down-to-earth values and doing something old-fashioned like quilting."