Every so often, Jim Williams wakes up in the middle of the night and lies awake inside his prison cell, thinking about quilt designs.

As his fellow inmates at South Central Correctional Center snore and shift in their sleep, Williams mulls over the layout of cloth shapes, rearranging them in his mind. “I’m kind of a perfectionist,” he said. “I’ll wake up at 2:30 in the morning and think, ‘That color really isn’t going to work.’”

It wasn’t always this way. Williams had never touched a sewing machine until last year, when he was recruited to sew face masks for prison inmates and staff during the pandemic.

Now he’s part of a small group of volunteers at the Licking, Missouri, prison who spend their days making intricately designed quilts for charity. The group, which relies entirely on donations, is working on an ambitious project: sewing personalized quilts for every foster child in Texas County.

https://news.stlpublicradio.org/culture-history/2021-07-09/missouri-inmates-sew-custom-quilts-for-foster-children-it-kind-of-breaks-your-heart