Phew, its been a super busy week - buzzy busy - the best kind! My Autumn Simple Sampler classes kicked off over the last two weeks and they have been such fun. I am so lucky that such lovely ladies have signed up and we are all off and running at a rate of knots! I will definitely remember to get some pictures next week to share with you all, there was lots of fabric, amazing cakes, big mugs of tea and quilts quilts quilts!
I also spent the week 'on tour' with a very special quilt I have been burning the midnight oil to finish. My amazing friends in my MakeClub group have been working on a Hexi-Quilt to the same design as my original one here . It has been made to be the prize in a competition running in our village of Wendover, here in Bucks to raise money for a very special charity- Mimis Mission.
Our children all go to school with a little girl called Mimi ( Amelia). She is a twin and she has Cerebal Palsy. She has been confined to a wheelchair and her condition had been deteriorating, but a groundbreaking new technique is being pioneered in the US, that can hope to restore her ability to walk. Its not available in the UK on the NHS and so an inspiring group of friends and relations formed Mimis Mission Charity, realising that funds had to be raised to help Mimi have the operation that offered her so much future hope. You can read more about this special family here and here
Our sewing group MakeClub, at the behest of our kids who have supported the charity through their schools, decided to make this our charity for this years quilt.
Each woman donated scraps from her stash, including Mimi Nana Netia. Each fabric in this quilt has had another life, or is also part of another project, our kids love picking out 'theirs'. We started making hexagons, with no colour plan, the pile just grew and grew. After a very busy morning back in February sorting and rearranging the amazing rainbow colour scheme emerged. Each woman was given a line of hexagons through the colour spectrum and asked to sew them into a strip, then attach her strip to her neighbours and pass it on. The quilt travelled around our village, slowly growing and changing - each woman hand stitching her donated strip to the whole.
We spent the summer hand quilting it, binding it and Rachel , our super talented PlainStitch class cake baker and embroiderer made a truly beautiful label for the back.
This quilt can be yours for two pounds! Imagine?! All you have to do is guess how many hours, minutes and seconds was spent in the making of it? You can see the quilt from the end of October displayed in the window of Cromptons Interiors on the high street here in Wendover, opposite Budgens and Rumseys Chocolatier. You can enter the competition in many of the Wendover shops, wherever you see the poster above, including Cromptons, plus at St Marys Church, at the infant school John Hampden School Christmas Fayre and at the charity Christmas Market on the Manor Waste on the 24th November. If you have kiddies or grandchildren at the Wendover schools and playschools the quilt will be touring them in the week before half term and there will be an opportunity to enter the competition then too. We have nearly 25 children and grandchildren who will all stand up proudly in their school assemblies and explain how the quilt was made - its been such a lovely project to be a part of!
Do have a go at winning it - its really a prize that money alone can't buy!
