QUILTERS REACH OUT TO AFRICA; POCAHONTAS CHURCH DONATES 100 QUILTS

POCAHONTAS -- While 79-year-old Anna Leimer keeps one eye on the wildlife shows she loves to watch on the Discovery Channel, she makes quilts.

During the past year, Leimer made 41 quilts. That's a lot of lions and tigers and bears.

Leimer isn't doing it just for fun, though she's been making quilts since she was a child. In the past year, Leimer and her two sisters-in-law, Mildred Brown, 75, and Norma Robinson, 69, made more than 100 quilts for their church, St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church.

The church is donating most of the quilts to Lutheran World Relief, an organization that will distribute many of them to needy people in Africa. These are all 60 inches wide, 80 inches long and weigh 3-4 pounds.

Leimer's son Joe, a driver for Ceramo Co., has arranged with his company to take the quilts to LWR headquarters in Minnepolis.

They are lightweight by most standards, but just right for draping about the shoulders in a warmer climate. "They don't have beds. They just wrap up in them," said Marjorie Swan, the church's stewardhip chairman.

The smaller children's quilts will go to Lutheran Family Children's Services in Cape Girardeau.

The quilts are an annual church project, but the women of the church never have made so many before. "I live in an apartment. I don't have anything else to do," Leimer says by way of explanation.

The church's 24 pews have been covered with quilts the past two Sundays, turning the 83-year-old building's interior into a sea of color.

These quilts aren't fancy works of country artistry adorned with intricate patterns. These quilts are made from discarded clothing, much of it longer-lasting synthetics. "It just never wears out," Brown says.

Adds Swan: "These are more for service than for beauty."

Quilting is recycling, Brown said. "We can use something that would otherwise go in a landfill." She points to an old pair of her own slacks that became part of the quilt in front of her.

Leimer, who also has made two quilts apiece for each of her nine grandchildren and is starting in on her 11 great-grandchildren, made her quilts from start to finish.

Brown and Robinson, who are sisters, brought their tops to the parish hall in March for a two-day session of tying and tacking accomplished with the help of four other members of the church.

Many of the scraps built into the quilts were donated by church members.

The quilt project is one many Lutheran churches under take.

"It is a type of ministry in many respects," says the Rev. Albert Nyland, the church's pastor.

"...A ministry doesn't have to just be preaching. It's a ministry of service."