LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) – Joyce Boerger says she learned to sew at around nine years old, starting out with dresses in a 4-H program. Now she’s helping to supply hundreds of pillow cases for those in need every year.

“I just enjoy doing it,“ Boerger said. “My proudest moment is I sewed a dress that took a purple at the state fair. I sewed about anything and everything.”

At 81 years old, she’s spent the better part of the last decade taking any extra fabric she can get her hands on and turning it into pillow cases, making around 400 to 600 a year.

And she does it all using the same sewing machine she’s had since 1963.

“I made my oldest son’s baby clothes on it, and I love it,” Boerger said. “It’s the hot dog method, and once you learn to do the hot dog method it goes pretty fast.”

While she started off with a pretty good stash of fabric 10 years ago, she said that friends, family and even members of her hometown church in Wymore have helped to keep her going with supplies.

Her sister Jan and the church’s pastor, Jim, also help by trimming, pinning and pressing each pillow case before it’s donated.

Designs patterns range from animals to flowers to dollar bills, which Boerger says makes the process more fun.

“I make the remark that I’m making pillow cases and people say ‘oh are you making them in white?’” she said. “Long ways away from white. They’re very colorful.”

This holiday season, she’s working with a friend, Tammy Hillis, to donate the pillow cases to places like the Friendship Home. She’s also brought pillow cases to the People’s City mission, supplying the shelter with more than 180 last year.

Hillis said they’ve also branched out to give some to the Orphan Grain Train, Sleep in Heavenly Peace out of Omaha and even Brave Animal Rescue.

Hillis, who runs a south Lincoln gas station and car repair shop, said she got to know Boerger as she brought her car in over the years, before she began offering up pillow cases to donate.

“She would play Christmas music in her car 24/7,” Hillis said. “When she’s got so many it’s like ok we only see so many customers throughout here, so we gotta branch out and help to spread the love.”

Boerger said even after thousands of pillow cases over the years, she isn’t planning to stop sewing any time soon, and will keep supplying them wherever they’re needed.

“It gives me something to do,” she said. “I’ve had them go to hurricane relief, I’ve had them go to, would you believe it an orphanage in Mexico, a foster outlet in Gretna … They just go kind of wherever somebody asks.”

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Former Nebraska U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse on Tuesday said he was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer.

Sasse, 53, made the announcement on social media, saying he learned of the disease last week and is “now marching to the beat of a faster drummer.”

“This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase,” Sasse wrote. “Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.”

Sasse was first elected to the Senate in 2014 and won reelection in 2020. He resigned in 2023 to serve as the 13th president of the University of Florida after a contentious approval process. He left that post the following year after his wife was diagnosed with epilepsy.

Sasse was an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, and he was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict the former president of “incitement of insurrection” after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Sasse, who has degrees from Harvard, St. John’s College and Yale, worked as an assistant secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush. He then served as president of Midland University before he ran for the Senate. Midland is a small Christian university in eastern Nebraska.

Sasse and his wife have three children.

“I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more,” Sasse wrote. “Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived.”