My favorite online quilting group is doing some charity projects in recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness. We started in October. We had 56 people volunteer to make pink and white ribbon blocks, 15 members volunteered to assemble all those blocks into quilt tops, 16 more people volunteered to quilt the tops, and 12 people volunteered to finish the quilts by binding and adding a quilting label. Then these quilts are to be donated to charities that would use them for fundraisers to promote efforts toward breast cancer research, awareness, or related activities.
I volunteered to quilt the tops that other people made. I did 5 of those and it was so much fun picking out what quilting design to use to highlight the quilt but not overpower the quilting design. I got to try out a bunch of designs I hadn't used before. Someone misread the volunteer list and thought I wanted to assemble the tops, so she sent me 9 pink ribbon blocks. I was supposed to send them to someone else but I kept forgetting. Then another member posted a design she came up with and I liked it so much, I decided to use her design and the 9 blocks sent to me by mistake and make a top. It came out great. I posted on the group that I needed some more blocks and got 9 more, so another top is in my future. Don't think I'll get it done before my surgery though
I went to the local quilt shop looking for fabric for the backing (when I was there previously they were having a clearance sale and had a bunch of pink fabric). Of course when I went back (after the inventory) there wasn’t hardly any pink fabric left and none with enough fabric to cover the back of my quilt. So I ended up paying full price for some really cool pink ribbon backing fabric. I'm so glad I did, it looks perfect. I also got some fabric on sale from a friend who has a fabric shop. I ended up buying 10 yards at a little over $4 per yard. Quite a deal. I used it on the back of 3 quilts.
But I had the hardest time picking a quilting design for the top I made. So I decided to use my favorite quilting design which is just swirls. It takes a long time and a lot of thread, but I didn’t care, it was what I wanted. Then I added the binding, including the hand stitching I hate. But the hand stitching wasn’t holding well, so I had to add machine stitching around the binding too (something I hardly ever do). So this charity project ended up costing me a bit more than planned and taking a lot more time than I dreamed, but I am so happy with the end results, it was definitely worth it. Now I just hope the charity it goes to will be able to use it to raise a bunch of funds for Breast Cancer Awareness.
Below are photos of the quilts I quilted (I didn’t piece 4 of the tops, they were each someone else’s design/work); the one with 9 stars is the one I made the blocks for (except the center ribbons) and added the perfect backing, quilted, and machine and hand-stitched the binding. Wish I was keeping it, but hopefully it’ll raise money for the cause and provide comfort to someone special.
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