DC Modern Gives Back

Hi everyone! I've been a bit remiss in organizing charity sewing events for us these past few months, but that changes starting now! After all, remember all the beautiful quilts our guild donated last fall? You all inspire me!

I'm planning upcoming events, one or two per quarter, for the rest of the year. I realize we are already well into quarter two at this point, but it's an easy one. The others are longer term, so I wanted you all to be thinking about them now. I'll need some volunteers to step up as well, so don't be shy!

Spring 2015 Project

I thought we'd start out slow with making some non-quilt projects for local children's hospitals. In particular, I was thinking of brightly colored pillow cases and baby hats for newborns.

Some of us have made pillow cases for charity at Mid Atlantic Mod and other events in the past - they are a great way to brighten up a hospital room, and so easy. If you need a tutorial, here are a few:

The pillow cases we make will be donated to the DC Metro chapter of ConKerr Cancer, which provides them to Children's National Medical Center in DC and Inova Fairfax.

I'd also thought a great way to use up scraps of knit fabric would be to make infant hats like this one and this one. If people have interest in this, I will find a local hospital to take them. 

I don't have any donated fabric for this challenge, but am hoping many of you have a yard of brightly colored fabric sitting in your stash that isn't quite right for your quilts, but would make a great pillowcase! You can bring these to me at the June or July meetings (or the May hand sewing one if you are really ambitious) or email me at heather@quiltsinthequeue.com for my mailing address.

Summer 2015 Project
We'll be participating in 100 Quilts for Kids again this year, with a quilt drive in the August/September timeframe. I'm looking for 3 volunteers to lead group quilts this year - 2 with donated fabric and 1 quilt made up of "orphan blocks" from guild members. I'd like to get these volunteers in place soon so they can begin to plan and recruit help for making blocks, quilting, etc.

Fall 2015 Projects
We will be making a couple of group quilts to donate this winter - one will be the QuiltCon charity quilt and the other will be a quilt donated to a local nursing home. Since the end of the year gets very busy with other commitments, we'll begin planning for these soon, too.

Thanks so much for hanging with me through this long text-heavy post. As a reward, here's a picture of our QuiltCon charity quilt from last year (photo credit: Lynne).