QUILTS FOR COLOMBIA

An ongoing project of the Mission Circle, which I belong to, has been making quilts for Word & Deed's projects in Colombia. Word & Deed has a child sponsorship program and operates many schools for children around the world. Several members of our Mission Circle have visited a home for girls in Colombia and, after hearing the stories of their visits, we decided to make quilts for all the girls in the home. Our first batch of 55 quilts was sent over a few years ago. Recently, the director of the project was speaking at a fundraising dinner in our area, so we decided to try and finish as many quilts as possible for her to take along and wrap more children with love! We spent a number of days working away and managed to get 27 quilts finished in time for the dinner. We make simple quilts by cutting donated fabric into 6 1/2" squares and laying them out in a diagonal pattern.

This bucket of squares is awaiting future quilt projects :

Once the tops are assembled, we get together to sandwich the tops with batting and backing and prepare the binding....here is the bucket of potential binding fabrics and a box of backings:


One of the ladies takes them home and 'machine ties' the corners of each square. The binding is also applied and they return all neatly folded on a hanger, ready for hand stitching it to the back (and the hangers even match!!):

A stack of quilts ready to be pinned:

My helper that day (Joan) got a little carried away by the batting and thought she might make a good Santa Claus LOL!

Margaret busily ironing the backing for a quilt:

Dora, our master binding ironer!! (hmmm, spell checker doesn't like that word :-). Dora ironed bindings all day long :-).

We do take a break for lunch and we always have a loaf of homemade bread and Alie's yummy meatball soup :-). I forgot to take a picture of the soup:

At our meetings, we work on stitching the binding down by hand while we listen to reports and letters from various missionaries around the world. (Left to right) Dora, Amanda, Margaret and Alie working hard:

Front to back; Jacqueline, Gerda, Joanne and Bertha:


Alie, Bertha, Joanne and Gerda:


Some of the quilts are also taken home to hand stitch. One of my quilt students, Corinna, even took a couple home to finish. Thanks Corinna!! And, Dora handstitched 10 or 11 of the quilts herself!! Wow, she's our expert hand stitcher!! Here Alie is getting started on one of them with a pile of totally finished quilts beside her:

Here are a few of the quilts completed or almost completed. Amazing what can be done from many peoples' discarded fabrics! There are many ugly fabrics that show up, but if you pair them with the right colours, they are wonderful.





We got this partially completed quilt from someone and had a lot of fun designing a little baby quilt with the story of Noah's Ark. Margaret stitched this quilt in the ditch around the blocks and I meandered the borders:


The back of the Noah's Ark quilt:

We pray that these quilts will share our love with these children in Colombia! If you have any 100% cotton fabrics that are lonely and need other fabrics to 'play with' or batting or backings that you want to get rid of, let me know and we can put it to very good use.