2021 report on charity quilting

Facebook recently reminded me of what I posted in December 2017. Four years ago, I sounded quite impressed that we had completed 88 charity quilts. The combination of retirement and stay-at-home COVID has altered the landscape.

In 2021, Judi and I completed 257 quilts and (flannel receiving) blankets. If you started counting one quilt a day on January 1 you would get to 257 on September 14. On average, for every ten days we completed seven quilts.

Project Linus received from us 185 quilts and all 21 of the blankets.The KC chapter of Project Linus reported a couple of days ago that they distributed 9,992 quilts and blankets in 2021. If you do the math you’ll see that Judi and I contributed 2 percent of those. Since it’s inception, the KC chapter has distributed 153,610 quilts and blankets.

In 2021, we donated 51 quilts to other initiatives. Since we purchased the longarm quilting machine in July 2015, we have made 994 charity quilts.

As I’ve mentioned before, quilt making produces scraps. You get scraps even when making a scrappy quilt, a never-ending cycle. In our main fabric storage unit, about one quarter of the drawers have width-of-fabric (WOF) pieces less than one yard. We have totes with WOF strips of various widths. We have squares and rectangles already cut for scrappy quilts. I have gone through most of the assorted fabric that doesn’t fit any of our other bins and have designed more than 60 quilt tops to use it up. So we begin 2022 among the scraps.

It has been two years since our last sewing popup to make quilt tops. Unless upended by COVID, we expect to work with about a dozen elementary kids at the end of the month to make quilt tops for Project Linus.

The compulsion to write this report must come from my decades of work in churches and nonprofits where I prepared reports regularly. Following that trajectory, then, this annual report is respectfully submitted to the board of directors (that’s you, reader).

We finished 2021 strong and begin 2022 with the same momentum.