JOHN DAY — There are few things more comforting than a nice, warm quilt, and 100 young patients at the Elks Children’s Eye Clinic in Portland will soon have one of their own thanks to the efforts of a dedicated group of Grant County quiltmakers.

The clinic, housed in the Casey Eye Institute at Oregon Health & Science University, traces its roots to 1949, when members of the Oregon City Elks Lodge partnered with what was then the University of Oregon Medical School in an effort to prevent childhood blindness. Since then, Elks lodges from around the state have contributed more than $40 million and thousands of volunteer hours to what is now known as the Elks Children’s Eye Clinic.

In 1987 the John Day Elkettes, a group of women affiliated with the John Day Elks Club, came up with the idea of making quilts for children receiving care at the clinic and began making and donating 100 quilts a year. The idea spread to other Elks lodges around the state, and now every child gets to select a quilt to take with them when they go into surgery.

To date, at least 16,500 quilts have been donated by more than 20 Elks clubs, according to Franny White, a spokesperson for OHSU.

“The lovingly made quilts comfort young patients before surgery and provide reassurance that OHSU Elks Children’s Eye Clinic surgical patients are in good hands,” White said. “One family has even shared that their child still cherishes their Elks quilt more than 10 years after they received it at OHSU.”

In recent years the John Day lodge stopped producing quilts for the annual donation, but Dennis Flippence, who became the club’s exalted ruler last year, was determined to restore the tradition.

“I knew this was a program I wanted to see come back,” he said.

Flippence reached out to Heather Swank to lead the effort.

“I knew Miss Heather was a quilter, and I knew she would do a fantastic job,” he said.

Swank, who describes quilting as her passion in life, contacted other local quilters — including members of the Strawberry Mountain Quilt Guild and the Grant County Piecemakers Quilt Guild — and brought them together for a meeting in January. Some of the Elkettes who had been involved in the earlier quilting project attended the meeting and offered their insights and tips.

And then the new group got to work.

“We worked once a week for a number of weeks,” Swank recalled.

The group, which eventually grew to number about two dozen women, would gather every Wednesday at the Elks lodge from noon to 4. They set up ironing boards, sewing stations and cutting stations, with the women pitching in where they were most needed.

“Everybody kind of worked at whatever they felt like doing, their little niche,” Swank said. “There were a lot of donated hours, a lot of donated materials, a lot of suggestions.”

The work was supported by donations of materials from the variety department at Chester’s Market, a substantial monetary donation from Rocky Mtn Dispensary and numerous individual contributions of cash and materials, Swank added.

Outside of the weekly quilting parties, some members of the group would take partly completed quilts home for finishing.

The result of their labors was 127 quilts. An even hundred will be presented by Flippence next month at the Oregon Elks Convention in Seaside, from where they will make their way to young patients at the Elks Children’s Eye Clinic, with the remaining quilts going toward next year’s donation.

Now that the Quilt Project has been revived at the lodge where it got its start, the John Day quilting group seems determined to keep the tradition alive.

“It’s a labor of love,” said Valeda Grant, one of the group’s members.

Swank endorsed that statement, noting that each quilt comes with a label that says, “Made especially for you, from John Day Elks Lodge #1824.”

“We’ve heard stories about how the children react when they get to come and pick out their quilt,” she said. “It’s a gift of love.”

In addition to Swank and Grant, other people who participated in the Quilt Project included Jackie Friese, Cindy Jackson, Karen Jones, Harriet Crum, Sue Newby, Deb Stamps, Diane Dupree, Colleen Carson, Gail Kolb, Cindy Brusch, Shellei Roberts, Susan Pielstick, Adele Wilson, Adrienne Smith, Phyllis Gregory, Judy Adams, Carolyn Wall, Bonnie Zick, Sindy Merrell, Nancy Harris, Sue Cavender and Sylvia Cockrell.

The Quilt Project depends on donations of cash and quilting materials to do its work. For more information or to make a donation, call the John Day Elks Club at 541-575-1824 or Heather Swank at 541-797-3300.