Network of Web sites devoted to recovering missing quilts

They look like Web sites devoted to finding missing children.

To die-hard quilters, they might as well be their children.

A story in Monday's Deseret Morning News about a missing quilt in Millard County spawned a number of e-mails from readers across America about a growing network of Web sites devoted to finding quilts that have been lost or stolen.

"It is a heartbreaking experience to have someone steal your quilt," Larrianne Spitzer of Arlington, Wash., wrote in an e-mail. "Especially something made by someone special who is no longer around."

Maria Elkins created the Web site lostquilt.com after nearly losing her quilt while shipping it to the 1999 National Quilting Association's annual show.

"It was something constructive I could do while I waited for my quilt to turn up," she wrote on her Web site.

Lostquilt.com also offers a "Missing Quilt Report" that lets people fill out information to be posted on the site. Elkins told the Deseret Morning News she has "easily over 500" quilts currently listed as missing or stolen on her Web site.

A burglary at a Kearns home in December 2006 put two quilts on the site.

"The quilts were wrapped and under the Christmas tree when the house was broken into and all the Christmas presents were stolen, along with an expensive digital camera and their computer," a woman wrote on the site. "A police report was filed."

Other Web sites also post pictures of lost or stolen quilts in hopes of recovering them. Many feature pleas from their owners, describing the hours of painstaking work they put into them — and the sadness at losing a family treasure.

Millard County sheriff's deputies put a family heirloom quilt belonging to a Delta minister on its "cold case" Web site in hopes of tracking it down. The quilt, belonging to the Rev. Dennis Cason, was made by his mother before she died at age 87.

Quilts can be valued at hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 2002, Piper's Quilts and Comforts in Salt Lake City's Sugar House neighborhood was broken into and nearly 40 quilts were stolen. Erin Hamilton said they recovered only a handful.

Still, she said, there was a network of quilters all over the country keeping an eye out.