Sewing warming packs, comforting cancer patients

So often, the service people render around the holiday season comes from the experiences of their own lives. Kendra Johnson and her family have a tradition of doing something for the cancer center at Memorial Hospital each Christmas in appreciation for her treatment there. Kendra is a cancer survivor.

In 2025, Kendra, along with her two children, Atleigh and Tristan and a young man, Ani, whom she home schools, is creating 350 warming packs for cancer patients at the medical center along with those who come to Ani’s mother, Dr. Rama’s office.

Kendra has a good appreciation for the kinds of comforts that are most wanted and needed by those being treated for cancer and these warming packs are just the thing to soothe the discomfort. Creating them involves a lot of cutting and sewing, but with the facilities and community-supplied fabric of Cruces Creatives, they have been hard at work incorporating this project into their school day.

“I was diagnosed with cancer in 2017 when my kids were little,” Kendra said. “They were five and two. Once I finished treatment my daughter and I decided we wanted to make something to give at the cancer center, so we started with these packs. You warm them up, they have rice in them so they retain heat.

The project was the hot packs one year, then one year they donated socks and foot cream.

“I thought this would be a great learning project and also a way to contribute some time in giving back to some other community and they all have a connection to it,” Kendra said. “Ani’s mom is an oncologist. She has her clinics, Rio Grande hematology, and my kids have a mom who's had cancer and their grandpa has cancer so it's a way for them to do something for a community that they know about but in a way in that’s not just donating money. The time, the commitment to follow through.”

Kendra is a retired schoolteacher who taught for 20 years before she and her husband decided to homeschool their kids

“We really want them to learn how to do life,” she said. “For me, this has a lot of benefit because it's a great homeschool lesson. There’s the math, the sewing. It's just kind of a great life lesson and also teaching them that giving back is a huge component of humanity.”

The hardest skill for the kids to learn? To thread the needle on the sewing machine.

“My daughter already knew how to sew,” Kendra said. “The boys picked it up very quickly. I was really surprised. They’ve done great. They have all done each part of it. They've all cut the fabric, they've sewn the bags, they’ve filled the rice.”

Initially, Kendra purchased three 50-pound bags of rice from Shamrock Foods on North Main, but now Shamrock Foods is donating the rice.

The availability of Cruces Creatives maker space is a huge reason Kendra is able to do this with her kids.

“It’s amazing because having this space we use the fabric that has all been donated,” she said. “We get to use multiple sewing machines, have a place to cut, multiple irons right here, so it’s a really easy activity to do yeah because we can spread out.”

Being in the environment has also allowed the kids to learn to work alongside and communicate with adults who use the space for other projects.

“Everybody's coming in and asking them what they're doing and so they're getting that opportunity to tell people what they're doing and why they're doing it,” Kendra said.