GILMAN CITY, Mo. -- Word was, Liberty Hospital needed pillows for its patients. Lots of them.

So when 82-year-old Ellen Sadler heard the news last July, she got to work. And she never stopped.

The homemaker's living room has been transformed into an assembly line. Bolts of cloth are spread on a pingpong table, measured, then precisely cut. Sadler sews, boxes and repeats.

The project has been an exercise in numbers.

Two yards of fabric, donated by Sadler's friends and hospital volunteers, make ten pillows. They're all cut along the same 11-by-13-inch pattern before being sewn and passed off to hospital auxiliary staff for stuffing. Eight-hundred yards of cloth has been used.

Ten months have passed since Sadler's mission began. And pillow No. 4,000 is now being stitched.

Sadler is no stranger to sewing. Her mother started teaching her when she was 3 or 4. By first grade, she was buying cloth for a nickel a yard and making her own dresses.

The years of practice have given a rhythm to Sadler's work. Unroll and measure, trace and cut, sew and box. Over and over again.

Sadler is always looking to keep busy. Typically four hours each day, five days each week, she works in the kitchen at the Harrison/Daviess County Retired Senior Volunteer Program in Pattonsburg.

Jeanne Moorefield, the director of volunteer services at Liberty Hospital, says Sadler's dedication to the pillow project has been a comfort -- literally -- to patients, though the volunteer is nonchalant about her work.

"It keeps me from playing old solitaire seek-and-find," Sadler said. "Don't know that I look to help people but that seems to be how it ends up."

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Information from: St. Joseph News-Press, http://www.stjoenews-press.com