OGDEN — The Internal Revenue Service sewed, stitched, crocheted and quilted to make homemade blankets for children in the Ogden community.
In one month, volunteers made 164 blankets for Project Linus, a national organization that donates handmade blankets to children in need.
IRS department manager KayJean Oritz Davis was excited Wednesday to see her handiwork — and that of 90-plus other volunteers — spilling over a donation cart ready to be dropped off at a nearby hospital.
Though the IRS often gets a bad rap, Davis wanted to prove that its employees care about their communities.
"There's a huge force of people here," she said. "In a concerted and united effort, we can accomplish a lot."
Project Linus has 400 chapters nationwide. The northern Utah chapter has only been around for six years, but in that time, it has donated thousands of blankets to traumatized, terminally ill, abandoned and abused children throughout northern Utah.
Whether donations are going to toward neonatal units or shelters, one fact remains the same: A child will receive a gift from someone they likely will never meet.
"They're such wonderful, beautiful people," Jean Nebeker, the chapter's coordinator, said of the IRS volunteers, "and they came through. They donated more than 160 blankets."
Nebeker's chapter donated 1,600 blankets to children last year. This year, it already has donated 1,366 to hospitals and shelters. Though that might be a small part of the 3.2 million donated nationwide, each blanket made a difference to a child.
"We want to put a better face on the IRS," Davis said. "We're people. We're human, and we all have emotions and feeling, and we're not the bad guys. … We can get out in the community and have a positive influence."
Bettie Hanson, an IRS employee with a grown daughter, said she didn't realize until she began making blankets at home that her own daughter received two blankets from the Linus Project. Hanson's daughter received one after having a miscarriage and another for her premature baby, who still uses it every night before he goes to bed.
"It was nice to able to give back and know that each time I made a blanket, I knew what the impact was going to be when it was given to a child," she said.
Hanson remembered the hospital environment her grandson was born into — one of plastic tubes and hospital-issued onesies. It was that little blanket that removed that sterile environment and replaced it with a touch of the homemade.
"To be able to pick that baby up and wrap him in his own blanket, you could see the comfort there," she said.
Davis estimates she put together about 16 blankets herself. Despite a longtime habit of volunteering, the project grabbed her attention in a different way. Whether she was at home watching TV or on a long drive, she would pull out a ball of yarn and begin crocheting another blanket.
Davis' favorite part of the project, she said, was that after each new blanket was completed, she got to start a completely new one, never letting it get boring.
"This was so exciting because every blanket is different," she said.
And every new blanket went to comfort another child.
e-mail: gbarker@desnews.com