What to do with all the scraps that a group of enthusiastic quilters store up in a year?
Last year we got together in the school holidays and had an I Spy quilting day with our scraps.
We each came with blocks cut or assembled from our most colourful scraps and had another fabulous quilting day at Tina’s.
Our quilts were squares sewn together with borders and fiery discussions occurred over placement and balance. The rows were all settled before another delightful lunch on the balcony. By the end of the day two beautiful quilts were pinned ready to quilt in the ditch.
We completed the bindings at the next quilting day. Hemming the bindings, with a couple of ladies working on sections each, made us feel like the ladies from American Quilt movie – real quilters.
Greta came up with the idea of sending them to Royal Far West Children’s Services to bring a little extra life and colour to the city accommodation provided for sick country children and their families. We received a lovely letter from Jan Kingston from Children’s Services with a photo of the quilts in use.
And the very happy ending to the story is now we have room to buy more fabric!
If your quilting group has a community project adventure we would like to hear from you.
What a lovely idea, creating fun, interest to your group and a lovely gift for sick kids. I co-ordinated a community quilt for my sister when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was a rewarding exercise, organising a group of mainly non-sewers to produce blocks for a quilt and putting them together to form a unique and colourful quilt to warm my sister through her gruelling chemo.
I love your site. Keep blogging, it is truly inspirational.
Hello Lisa
Thanks for your blog. I love to hear about comfort quilts and I hope organising non-sewers to produce a quilt hasn’t stunted your quilting career. At school we are encouraged to teach children our passions during Friday afternoon challenges but the thought of twenty grade ones with soggy threads and unthreaded needles just doesn’t inspire me to impart any enthusiasm at all. And don’t even mention the knots- tightly wet ones! Shameful, I know and so lacking a quilters’ generosity. Hope your quilt worked some magic for your sister.
I have enjoyed reading your frog pond site. I was at a friend’s barbecue a couple of weeks ago and we were sitting out on a deck quite near the neighbours and a sick pool filter noise started and it was very close and quite loud. I commented on how unthoughtful the neighbours were and how surely they could hear the small gathering and turn off the noisy filter just for the night. Then my friend pointed out that the noise was a frog. It continued running its motor the whole evening but once I had processed that it was a natural sound it seemed to fade into the background. Hope you have lovely neighbours. Cheers Cathie
Isn’t sewers an unfortunate word? Cathie
I agree. All this activity reminds me of Liz Byrski’s book, Gang of Four. Have you read it? This is the sort of thing that seems to be uniquely female – something we’re really good at. Imagine getting women all over the world to make quilts in support of those going through tough times – a great antidote to war-mongering. Keep blogging and the message will spread.