Danielle Ray
Special to The Landmark
STERLING Longtime resident Jill Valerio-Laine has certainly found a way to make lemonade out of lemons. She is upcycling material remnants from the more than 3,500 masks she has made over the last year by creating “COVID community quilts,” as she calls them.
“I have so many small pieces of material left over from making masks which could not be used for masks,” Valerio-Laine said. “As a quilter, we use all of our scraps; we don t waste.”
Valerio-Laine decided to donate her first COVID community quilt to Animal Shelter Inc., which is commonly referred to as the Sterling Animal Shelter. The shelter sold it at a silent auction last spring to raise funds for the facility.