‘Wonderful people’

Nov. 14—EPHRATA — The Fabric Patch’s breast cancer auction was not your typical fundraiser. There was no expensive venue, no banquet, no volunteers pouring wine or selling raffle tickets. Just a camera, a few dedicated women, and thousands of bidders.

“We have over 176,000 subscribers to our YouTube channel,” said Fabric Patch owner Cindi Rang. “We have all of these quilting friends, these people that watch us, and they buy fabric and they make quilts. They’re just wonderful people.”

The Fabric Patch’s online auction Saturday raised more than $52,000, Rang said. About 450 items were sold, only about 20 of them actually contributed by the Fabric Patch. The rest were donated by subscribers to the YouTube channel: quilts, table runners, artwork, pottery, wooden bowls. One quilt sold for more than $2,000, Rang said.

This is the fourth year the Fabric Patch has held its cancer fundraiser, Rang said. It started small, as a way to help a friend of the Fabric Patch team.

“We had a friend who was going through breast cancer, and so we thought for October, we would do a little fundraiser,” she said. “So each of us got a bra, we decorated the bra, and then we auctioned it off, and that person got the money.”

The grassroots nature of the auction struck Rang as a good way to raise funds, she said; rather than sending money to national organization, they could use it to benefit individuals who were battling cancer.

“(We had) friends that are dealing with financial hardships, either because of transportation or time off work or deductibles or wigs or prosthetics or whatever,” Rang said. “So we wanted to just specifically raise money for our friends. And it went so well that the next year we had more people who wanted to participate and help their friends.”

This year, the Fabric Patch accepted nominations for 50 people and went online to raise $1,000 for each of them, to use for whatever they needed. Fans of the YouTube channel sent in names of people facing various kinds of cancer. In the end they received 54 nominations, whose names and some of their stories were read by Fabric Patch Shipping Manager Tracy Cole at the beginning of the auction. All were women except one man from Coalinga, Calif.

“Ruthie’s husband Charles was diagnosed this summer while (she was) here (in Soap Lake),” Cole said. “Ruthie got word that he had a positive mammogram and biopsy. So they’re doing their treatments and he’s hanging in there, and she is too.”

Another nominee was Dale, a fellow fabric vendor from South Carolina.

“She’s owns the Carolina Quilt Studio, Cole said. “She owns the shop with her husband, Jimmy, … They kept the shop open through surgery, chemo (and) radiation, and they’re gonna just keep going. She’s a warrior keeping the store open.”

The Fabric Patch has been at its brick-and-mortar location in Ephrata for more than 25 years, Rang said. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and small businesses had to close, Rang and her staff made a small video tutorial on how to make a mask, with an eye toward supplying local nurses and firefighters.

“(We were) thinking it was just kind of a local thing, and it went crazy,” Rang said. “It went viral, and we had millions and millions of people that watched the videos. Then we did how to do a child’s mask, and what if you run out of supplies, and we ended up making all of these masks. And we had people that would say, ‘Hey, I watched your video, but I don’t have a sewing machine. Can I just buy some masks?’”

Rang and her team made more than 176,000 masks, she said, and gave them all away. Eventually they decided to do a video in which the pandemic wasn’t even mentioned, just chatting about fabric. Those became so popular that they expanded into box opening videos, where they demo new items, and chat videos between Rang and her daughter Brianna Motzkus, who also works at the store. The videos have proven popular with both serious sewists and casual viewers alike.

“It used to be one (online) order maybe every other month, and now it’s fairly common for us to have about 600 or 700 orders a week,” Rang said. “Probably 80% of our business is online.”

All of the recipients have been sent their checks and the merchandise has all been mailed out, Rang said.

“I think (it was) really special because it was just a group of friends, people from all over the United States and Canada that sent things to us and then also purchased things so that their friends could all benefit from it,” she said.