They've been playing with the angels for weeks now in Bobbie Burnett's basement.
Dozens of volunteers -- engineers, retired women, teen-agers from a local church -- have been cutting bits of colored glass, fitting translucent wings and silvery halos on stained-glass angels, washing off the acid used before soldering, then fitting their fragile artwork into white boxes.
Profits from the $30 cherubs go for cancer research at the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center in Baltimore and the Anne Arundel Medical Center. In the last decade, The Caring Collection has brought in more than $55,000 for medical equipment and for cancer research and treatment.
Artist Burnett, a sprightly blonde who would make a nice angel herself, made the first stained-glass angel eight years ago for a friend dying of cancer. She ended up making several angels to help the woman pay her hospital bills.
Other friends saw the ethereal glass creations and asked for replicas.
Volunteers offered to help make the angels, and the group, based in Burnett's Annapolis home, "ended up shipping 4,000 angels all over world," Burnett says.
"God closes a door and opens a window, they say," she says, "but I didn't know all those angels would fly in!"
Burnett gestures around the room, to the dozens of finished three-dimensional angels, stately in pink, white and blue, to dozens more in various stages of assembly around the room -- and to as many volunteers, the "other angels," she calls them.
At a long table, Peg Leigh, 72, solders halos for the nearly 8-inch-high figures. "See how holy I am," she says teasingly.
Leigh joined the volunteer team two years ago when her husband died of cancer. "It's good therapy, and it's fun. And we're doing something to help those who have cancer," she says.
The group has bought IBM computers for the Hopkins oncology center, and last year they purchased a piece of equipment for lung cancer patients at Anne Arundel Medical Center.
Burnett, an art teacher and stained-glass artist, says she couldn't do it without the volunteers, whom she calls "those wonderful people who show up at 5 a.m. to solder wings and halos."
Nearly 40 people helped to get ready for a reception Sunday, during which $8,000 worth of angels were sold. The helpers range from Helen Barbano, who is retired, to teen-agers from St. Mary's School in Annapolis, to Jerry Klinken, a systems analyst with the state comptroller's department.
