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By: Pam Gibbens, Houston Chronicle correspondent
This article appeared January 11, 2007, in the “This Week” section of the “Houston Chronicle” and is reprinted with permission.
For Evelyn Dainard, each day is a precious gift from God. After being diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2002, she knows firsthand just how fragile life can be. Dainard’s doctors discovered the disease after a routine checkup.
“I had no symptoms,” she said, recalling the evening she got a dreaded phone call. “I was in the middle of preparing dinner. A nurse called and said that the test came back and ‘you have cancer.’ Just like that. I said, ‘Oh, thank you’ and just went back to dinner. I guess I was in shock.”
Dainard began rounds of chemotherapy and radiation therapy at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Like many cancer patients, Dainard became extremely ill after each treatment. Though she suffered from serious side effects, Dainard continued to work from her home-based business, sewing religious habits for Catholic priests and religious all over the world.
“I had five weeks of radiation,” she said. “On Mondays and Tuesdays, I was very sick. By Wednesday, I felt a little better. By Friday and Saturday, I was working. I had my calling, I had orders to fill.”
Her family and friends at Saint Martha’s Catholic Church in Kingwood, Texas, a north suburb of Houston, prayed for Dainard’s complete recovery. Their prayers were answered. Today she is cancer-free.
Dainard learned her craft by watching her Philippineborn mother sew clothes for the family. She enjoyed sewing sundresses for her own daughter.
“We were living in New Orleans at the time,” said Dainard. “All of the mothers at my daughter’s pre-school wanted to know where I got her dresses. I told them that I made them myself. They started ordering patterns and material for me to make clothes for their children.”
After relocating to Kingwood in 1991, Dainard’s interest turned to embroidery. “I started embroidering towels, baby bibs and shirts. I sold them at the festivals at Saint Martha’s.
After visiting a convent in New Caney (near Kingwood) in 2001, Dainard became acquainted with several of the Carmelite nuns who reside there. One of the sisters who used to do liturgical sewing at the convent had passed away and nuns had been praying for a new seamstress for two years. Dainard was their answer and began helping the sisters keep up with their orders for church vestments.
Around that same time, the sisters were asked by a priest, Father Gregory Houck, prior of the Carmelite community in Houston, if they could make habits for the young men preparing to enter the Carmelite novitiate. The sisters recommended Dainard and she constructed a pattern from an older habit. Father Houck was impressed with the habit Dainard had then made for him. He said, “I gave her one of my old habits and three weeks later she called to say the new one was ready. It was perfect; and she actually made a few improvements on the original.” He ordered three more for the novices.
Those novices along with Father Houck wore the new habits at a ceremony in New York on a weekend in June of 2001. By Monday, Dainard had received twelve emails from friars from California, New York, Arizona and even the West Indies all wanting to know how they could order a habit too.
“I thought I was hallucinating! I thought, ‘this isn’t happening; this isn’t real,” Dainard said. “I had received my calling.” Orders for her habits now come in from Carmelites around the world and she receives orders from Peru, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Austria. In addition, she now sews habits for a new religious group called the Franciscans of the Sick Poor located in Los Angeles.
Dainard calls her business GETJ Creations, an acronym for Greg and Evelyn and Tom and Jennifer (her husband and children). Since her health has improved, the company is purring along like a well-oiled Singer sewing machine. Bolts of brown wool and polyester fabric are stretched across the table in Dainard’s sun-drenched dining room, a perfect place to cut out patterns.
“My busy season is January through the end of May. I’m usually booked. I still do embroidery but the habits are my priory,” Dainard said.
“In the spring, I will be making habits for a group in Rome,” Dainard beamed. “It’s the Society of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity.” “My husband jokes, that ‘pretty soon they will call you to make something for the Pope!”
Dainard is grateful to be recovering from cancer. She firmly believes that God is in control of her life. “I have a purpose to make habits. God is using me to bring more people to believe in Him. I’m really happy, especially to be working at home.”
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