Mid-year report on charity quilting

Here’s our mid-year report to the board of directors. (If you are reading this, that’s you.)

We begin with a confession. This must be the year of the sloth. In the midst of stay-at-home 2020, at this time last year we were averaging one charity quilt per day. In 2021, we’re making just one quilt every two days. Sloth, I tell you. So far this year we have made 94 charity quilts. Early this afternoon we will deliver 52 quilts to Project Linus.

We discovered last winter that there are over 400 homeless students in our school district. We were pleased to know that the school district provides a new pillow and blanket to every child who they discover has started to sofa surf. Judi is now the liaison between the school district and Project Linus. She delivered 50 quilts to the school district in April.

There seems to have been a shift in need in our community. From our vantage point, it seems like the Project Linus Kansas City chapter is serving more agencies rather than primarily the children’s wards in local hospitals. We’ve been told that there is now a greater need for larger quilts, so we’re making the shift toward more twin-size quilts and fewer crib-size quilts.

We’ve decide that it’ll be Christmas in July this month. We noticed several weeks ago that we have four totes with Christmas fabric. We maybe purchased ten or fifteen percent of that and were given the rest. Since Project Linus will not receive seasonal items, we had to figure out how the Christmas fabric might be used. Here’s the plan. In the next four or five weeks Judi and I will make a few sets of Christmas place mats and several Christmas throws. These will be available at a family initiative we’re calling We’re All Family to raise money we’ll donate to help others. At the We’re All Family event probably the weekend after Thanksgiving Day, besides the quilted goods, we expect to have available for purchase pour paintings, baked goods, and printed copies of the Christy Kids Chronicles, superheros extraordinaire. Stay tuned on how you might participate in We’re All Family as we seek to provide assistance to others in the holiday season. Any Christmas throws that don’t sell at the We’re All Family event will be given to a social-worker friend who will distribute them in senior adult care facilities. We’ll not totally eliminate the Christmas stash in July, but we’ll get started.

After Christmas in July, we’re going to move directly into Scrappy August. I’ve reported before on the fact that quilting generates tons and tons of scraps: leftovers from cutting the pieces for the quilt top and pieces from the minimum of four-inch buffer on all sides of the backing on the longarm machine. In addition, Judi pieces together chunks of batting that we use on quilts. Anything too small for us to use goes to a group that uses it as stuffing in pet beds for animal rescue agencies. Everything goes to work for someone’s benefit.

As you can see, we have scraps. And more scraps. Judi has a bin in which she puts the fabric chunks as they are created. If it is width-of-fabric (WOF), she eventually cuts the largest strips she can. For example, she has seven shoe-box bins with just two-and-a-half inch by WOF strips. With the less than WOF pieces, she cuts rectangles or squares that will be made into blocks that will eventually become scrappy quilts. I did some research in designs used in brickwork and developed patchwork patterns that we are using a lot. So the focus of our work in August is going to be trying to make a dent in the ever-increasing bins of scraps.

One more thing to report. As of July 10, we will have been in this house one year. As we began to use the basement as a quilting studio, it became evident that a few changes would make things function better. We moved out furniture we ended up not using and added new items to make the room into more of a dedicated sewing studio rather than a multipurpose room. I’ve attached a photo of the cutting table made from two IKEA cubbies and a butcher-block countertop. Next additions will be a 48″ by 80″ design wall and a 16″ x 56″ pressing table that will replace that scrawny ironing board. Judi has commented several times in the past few weeks about how much better the space is for the work she does. If momma’s happy, everybody’s happy.

So that, folks, is the 2021 mid-year report from the basement quilting studio of the Schwanzi. Carry on.