Put On a Happy Face

Courtney Albright remembers being given a homemade teddy bear when she was in Inova Fair Oaks Hospital's emergency room a few years ago.

"I was 3 or 5 and had an asthma attack. I remember going there and getting a bear and sleeping with it every night," she said. She named the bear Stripes because of its striped cotton fabric.

Now Courtney is an eighth-grader at Franklin Middle School in Chantilly and proud to say that she has made her own bear to give to the hospital. Hers is made of polka-dot material. She hopes it will comfort another child the way Stripes comforted her.

Courtney's school is like a machine when it comes to making teddy bears for the hospital's Children's Project, whose goal is to provide a huggable teddy for every young patient -- about 3,300 last year.

Since the project started in the early 1990s, the hospital has handed out more than 52,000 teddy bears. Franklin Middle students have sewn 3,778 of them -- the most of any school taking part, said project chairman Mary Agnes Mosher.

Mosher has been there from the start. She was teaching sewing and cooking classes at the school when the hospital launched its bear drive in 1991, and she worked to include making bears in what students learned. Now every eighth-grader in the school's family and consumer sciences, teen-living program machine-sews and donates at least one bear to the hospital.

Some do as many as five in a semester, said Janet Hannemann, who teaches teen living. With about 150 eighth-graders enrolled at a time, that's a lot of bears -- 250 of them last year alone.

Several schools in Fairfax County are involved in the Children's Project, as are many Girl Scout troops.

The Fair Oaks bears aren't like those popular roly-poly Build-a-Bears that kids can make at the mall. They are flatter and more flexible, and each one has a unique, hand-drawn face. The bears made at Franklin Middle also have heart-shaped bibs made of felt.

Students in a recent teen-living class agreed that sewing is cool -- for boys, too.

"I like it because it helps the kids at the hospital," said Joshua Harris.

"It's a fun activity, and it relieves stress," said Dante Verme.

Kristen DiMarco made three bears, keeping one and donating the other two. "I just felt good about myself when I did it," she said.

Dustin Ward-Dahl also made three bears. "I like making things for a purpose," he said. He chose Scooby-Doo fabric and a black-and-white cow print that he thought little kids would like.

The project requires that students learn how to follow a pattern, properly pin material, clip curves and operate a sewing machine -- skills that might be useful later on.

"It was hard, but I learned how much I could sew, and I'll probably do more when I'm older," said Kristen.

-- Sandra Fleishman