Bobbie Burnett proudly displays the different designs her stained-glass angels have taken over the past 26 years. She gave her first angel as a gift to a friend with leukemia. Then she started selling angels to pay for Susie Lyttle's care.
Burnett contributed only $200 to Lyttle before she died in 1983.
Now Burnett has a loftier goal spelled out in gold lettering in the middle of the wall where her angels stand watch: to reach $1 million in total donations. Her 90 volunteers, who rotate shifts in her Annapolis studio three days a week, make angel figurines and pins, along with sun catchers of birds, flowers and other images.
Katie Hood, Lyttle's 37-year-old daughter, has been one of those volunteers for the past 10 years. Her brother and sister have helped out, too.
"I feel sort of a commitment to her and a commitment to the angels," said Hood, who lives in Millersville.
So far, Burnett's nonprofit, Caring Collection Inc., has donated $755,000 to patient care at the Geaton and JoAnn DeCesaris Comprehensive Cancer Institute at Anne Arundel Medical Center and to research at the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. The money has been evenly divided between the centers.
Burnett, a former art teacher, said she wants to wait until after Christmas before she releases sales figures for this year. Volunteers will review proposals from the cancer centers in February and award grants in April.
Burnett, 70, and her husband, Jerry, 73, put in six days a week in their basement studio. They continued their efforts while Jerry was treated for colon cancer in 2001. They estimate they and their volunteers have made 37,000 angels and other creatures.
"This has consumed our life for the past 26 years," Bobbie Burnett said. "This is not my work. It's my life."
This year, a $25,000 grant from the Caring Collection bought six mobile registration computers that can be wheeled to a patients' bedsides, said Lisa Hillman, director of the Anne Arundel Medical Center Foundation. In previous years, grants have bought an ultrasound machine, blanket warmer and a fiber optic device that detects tumors.
Hillman said many of the center's current and former cancer patients volunteer to make angels. Burnett's sun catchers are all over the hospital, said Catherine Copertino, executive director of the DeCesaris cancer institute.
"Small touches like that make a tremendous difference to these patients," Copertino said.
