Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Comfort Quilt Project

While I am taking a wee break from sewing thousands of pink HST's, I thought I would enjoy cutting into some fabric.
For the comfort quilt project at my quilt guild, we make up block kits for the members to take home each meeting. They sew the blocks and bring them back to the next meeting. Then another member (usually someone who falls in love with the blocks) takes the blocks home to sew them into a quilt top. Then another member does the quilting and brings it back to the next meeting. Finally another guild member does the binding. That's a lot of member participation to complete one quilt! 
Our motto is...every little bit helps! And we encourage people to help out by doing whatever part of the projects they are interested in and have the time for. And all of these efforts result in our guild donating 40 - 50 beautiful quilts each year to the pediatric sexual assault unit at our local hospital. 
For example at the Quilt Bee day in the fall I started machine quilting a project which was made from donated blocks. I recently finished the quilting and now the quilt will be handed off to the person who likes to do binding.

So this is the start of another comfort quilt made from a bag of donated plaid fabrics. The pattern is called Nine Patch Split - one of the free patterns on Bonnie Hunter's website.
I had a great time sorting through the bag of fabrics, pulling out what pieces to cut into and organizing block kits. I got a little carried away with that yummy orange plaid and made all the HST's for the blocks (wasn't I just complaining about making 600 pink HST's?!?!) 
And then I started making some blocks to be able to put one completed block in each kit and realized that if I didn't get a grip on myself, I'd end up making all the blocks and have nothing to hand out at the next guild meeting :)
Here are the 12 block kits ready to go into the plastic bags for the next guild meeting.

8 comments:

Purple Quilter Queen said...

That sounds like a great way to get quilts made! And I love your motto! You're doing a good thing. Love the orange and purple blocks! Jenn

Jacqui's Quilts said...

ROFLOL!! Kathy...you operate the same way I do!! That is too funny...glad you left something for your fellow guild members to make or you'd end up having to organize another project!

Jacqui

Anonymous said...

Great idea to finish quilts and get everyone involved. I would choose the binding - I LOVE doing binding!

Mary Johnson said...

We try to do a similar thing at HeartStrings by allowing people to send in blocks or a top if they don't want to do the entire quilt and it does all add up!

Of course, every time I think I'm going to contribute to the block inventory I end up keeping my blocks and finishing the quilt. Once I get started, it's hard to hand off.

Helen in the UK said...

Great job! It obviously wasn't the HSTs you were fed up with ... just the pink :)

Alycia said...

That is a great idea! I love the colors that you have chosen for the next comfort quilt!

Brenda Kay said...

I love the idea of so many hands in one project. That's just more love poured into it to pass around. Left a little something for you over at my blog.

Susan said...

That is going to be a great quilt....... You are really kind to put so much effort into the project.