Eileen Illsley found her sociable Scottie and companionable kitties through animal rescue.
For the quiet little woman, a retired bank vice president, her critters provided the best company at her home at River Mobile Estates, all the way up to her death from cancer in February at age 69.
So when the time came for Peggy Ice and the gang of quilters in River Mobile Estates-based River Crafters to do something with the quilt Illsley had started and expert hands had finished, they had a pretty good idea what would have made her smile.So they decided to raffle it off and dedicate all the proceeds to the Auburn Valley Humane Society so the AVHS board could have more money in the kitty to furnish the future animal shelter on A Street Southeast.
“She really liked animals, so I figured, this is what we’d do,” Ice said, standing before the completed quilt on a wall at the River Mobile Park Estates Community Center last Monday.
The quilt raised $1,201.46 for the shelter. In so doing, it made the Auburn Crafters charter member 40 of the new animal shelter. So far fundraising has gathered about $43,000 of the $200,000 needed, mostly through the sale of more than a fifth of the 200 available $1,000 charter memberships.
Siobhan Brennan of northeast Tacoma, an Irish native who has lived in the United States since 1994 and a Horizon Airlines employee, was absolutely gobsmacked by the brilliantly colored quilt she had won, the first and only one Illsley ever made.
“It’s absolutely beautiful. I’m thinking it’s going to go in my spare bedroom, which I was about to redecorate anyway. I don’t even have to pick colors, I can go with this,” Brennan said.
Ice said she met Illsley one day when the two were out walking about the mobile home park.
“She was a little person. She didn’t have a lot to say. She was as quiet as I am loud. I talked, she listened. We kind of became joined at the hip. She was shorter than me, if that’s possible,” Ice said with a laugh.
“I got her into doing different things. She wasn’t a joiner, but I got her into the quilters.”
Ice said the quilt was two years in the making … and unmaking. Illsley wanted her first effort to be just so, so she did a lot of tearing out.
“She kept saying, ‘I’ve done more unsewing than I have sewing,'” Ice recalled. “Then she became quite ill with cancer. Her sister gave me all of her quilting stuff, and I finished it. I took care of the quilting, her sister did the binding, and I decided what was going to be done. I got all the quilters’ opinions about the quilt and what to do with it, and everybody agreed.”
Auburn City Councilmember John Partridge, the City’s liaison to the AVHS, said the next fundraiser will be February at the White River Valley Museum. Donovan Brothers begins work on the shelter this spring. All work has to be finished by Jan. 1, 2013 at the latest when the current animal services contract with King County expires.
