Christmas Day might be 6 weeks away, but today St Mark’s Quilters held our final workshop for the year and celebrated our 4th year of quiltmaking together with a break-up Christmas lunch in the garden.
We began the year making quilts for the folk of Dunalley in Tasmania who had lost their homes in the January bushfires, then went on, over the following months, to make dozens of Blankets of Love for Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and child-sized quilts for “The Marcia” kindy for autistic children at Liverpool.
Sadly we’ve ended the year once again working on quilts for victims of disastrous bushfires, this time closer to home in Winmalee in the Blue Mountains. That’s the harsh reality of summer here in Australia. And the season has hardly begun.
As soon as Di B and I read Tracey’s appeal to quilters for assistance in giving every school aged child a quilt, as well as an extra quilt for every household, we knew we wanted to get on board to make her vision a reality in the new year.
We emailed our quilters the instructions for a very simple double square block and asked them to raid their stashes, if they wanted to help, and bring along as many completed blocks as they could today. These were to be the building blocks for our quilts for Winmalee.
Those girls are wonderful. They brought along more than a hundred blocks!
After a day of crawling on the floor to arrange and rearrange blocks into child-sized and adult-sized quilts, we have around 8 finished quilt tops – and rather a lot of homework to do quilting them!
The blocks were numbered with masking tape and stacked together in order, making it possible for many hands to work together stitching them into quilts.
We have quilts in reserve (we like to keep some for emergencies), so along with these we’re confident we’ll be able to make a decent contribution to this heartwarming effort by the wider quilting community.
Lunch in the garden was a fun affair, with delicious food contributed by everyone.
Once again we thanked God for giving us a passion for creating quilts, a gift we all love using to give comfort to people in need of encouragement and hope.
There were paper hats (no photos!) and Christmas earrings.
And the usual show and tell.
Another Blanket of Love by Margaret
And these colourful kiddies’ quilts…
Barb
Gail
Di C
Michaela
Moo
Gillian
Michaela
Michelle worked on the binding of a beautiful quilt she’s made for the newborn daughter of an Iranian refugee couple in her church.
1930s fabrics, large quilting stitches and knots give this quilt real vintage charm, and I know it’s going to be treasured.
Gillian has finally finished a real labour of love, two storybook quilts for her granddaughters.
I could suggest you play “spot the differences” and there are quite a few, but both are enchanting, with sparkle and quirkiness, and all the traditional elements of a fairytale – a king and queen (complete with golden crowns), a handsome prince and a frog who might be a prince in disguise, a beautiful princess, a rather friendly looking dragon, and a snow white unicorn.
Finally, if you’ve made it this far I’ll leave you with a little bit of silliness, a collage of some of the bags people brought today. They just made me smile 
looks like you all had an enjoyable day together and got a lot done!
ReplyDeleteNot only did I get goosebumps when I read your post, but my eyes welled up with tears. Bravo to you ladies! Love those bags!
ReplyDeleteWow, you all achieved a lot......and had a fun day too! Now let me guess, the pink bag is yours.......?
ReplyDeleteWonderful pics Di - what a lot of fun you have when you're with stitching friends. I meet monthly with a group and over the years we've gone far beyond mere friendship and are surely family now. blessings, marlene
ReplyDeleteSuch a worthwhile cause and fabulous team effort. hats off to all of you.
ReplyDeleteYour quilters are so dependable! Amazing too, that they could produce 100 blocks just like that, and turn out eight quilt tops. I'm tickled to see how you marked blocks for putting together later. :-) Great! Every finish is wonderful, and I'm happy you had a celebration. You are a blessed group, and are a great blessing to others.
ReplyDeleteOur quilting group, working in conjunction with the Salvation Army people, have given away over 100 quilts to children from pre-schoolers to high school students in the last couple of weeks. Many of the quilts were donated to us either completed or as flimsies. Crafters are so generously, aren't they?
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