Part 1: Annual Report on Charity Quilting

The year 2020 has come to an end … finally. In an attempt to move toward 20/20 vision as we look back on an out-of-focus, once-in-a-lifetime year (I hope), we offer our annual report to the board of directors (if you are reading this, that’s you). Our description of this part of our lives in 2020 will come in three parts over three days. We start with what we did, then go to why we did it and how we will launch 2021.

We started strong on the first Saturday of 2020 with a pop-up sew day at the Blue Valley library with Stella’s soccer team. We made 19 quilt tops that morning. Since more time is spent indoors in Kansas in the winter, Judi and I kept chugging with quilting through the cold months.

Then COVID-19 waltzed into town. You ain’t gonna to plop down in the easy chair, she says, and stare out the living room window until this invisible stranger gits outta Dodge. You just ain’t gonna, she says. For once, she says, you gotta do something productive with yourself.

So we decided to see if we could average one charity quilt a day. We had a good pace already established by March so we had only a little catch-up to do. Then we just had to keep on keeping on. Karla, Oliver, Stella, and Miles had to stay home, too. They made quilt tops during the spring.

But then the unplanned happened in June. We bought a house. We moved. We rehabbed the old house. We sold the old house. At the end of September we finally had time to fully move into the house in which we had slept at night since July.

As the stay-at-home continued into the fall, our friends Becky (recently retired) and Melody (middle-school student) made several quilt tops. We received a gaggle of bags of fabric pieces and yardage from Project Linus. It was time to begin thinking about getting the quilt studio in operation at the new house.

Our last quilt was completed in the old house on 18 June, day number 170 in 2020. On that day we finished charity quilt 170. If we picked up the rhythm in the new house on 19 November then that was day 171. In that numbering scheme, December 31 would be day 213.

In 2020, we completed 213 charity quilts, the equivalent of one charity quilt a day for seven months. That’s about 675 yards of fabric and seven-and-a-half rolls of batting (each roll is 90 inches by 30 yards).

Our quilting has always been a team sport. There’s no way Judi and I could have accomplished what we did in 2020 without working together–the sum is greater than the parts. I often design and select fabric for a quilt top. Judi does the piecing. She prepares the finished top and backing for me to do the quilting. Judi sews the binding.

But there are more than just the two of us involved: Stella’s soccer team and parents, Karla and the kids, Becky, Melody. One of the changes imposed by COVID-19 is that we only had one sewing pop-up in 2020. We already have plans for new ways to get folks engaged in sewing for Project Linus, some we can do while still under stay-at-home directives and others for when things open up again. I’ll post more about the importance of the community tomorrow since that gets at why we do what we do.

So that’s our report about what we did in 2020. If you gotta stay home, she says, do something with yourself. So there’s that.

P. S. Here are a few more numbers to consider. Being 2020 and all, Judi made 741 face masks. Some went to the Navajo Nation; others to local at-risk communities and schools. She made 13 flannel receiving blankets for Project Linus. She knitted 22 hats this year and all went to an agency serving kids in south Johnson County.