Quilting for Deborah House

I’ve been taking a short break from my two current needlework projects to make a couple of patchwork squares to contribute to quilts for Deborah House, a residential care home in Romania providing sanctuary and specialist care for severely abused girls.

The quilting project is the brainchild of another Deborah, this one living in Northern Ireland, who is asking quilters around the world to create patchwork blocks, each with a finished size of 8 inches (that’s 8.5 inches/ 22 cm allowing for seams), to be made into quilts for the girls of Deborah House.

The first blocks received (unless you specify that you want them to be used by the girls) will be made into a prize quilt for an online competition with 100% of proceeds going to Deborah House.  Subsequent blocks will be made into quilts for the girls of Deborah House and delivered by Northern Irish Deborah (are you keeping up?) and her family in October this year.

To allow time for the making up, Deborah will be accepting completed blocks until July 2012.

More information, including Deborah’s address, where completed blocks should be sent, is to be found on her dedicated Quilts of Hope blog.  If you don’t quilt, but can knit or crochet, you’ll see from recent posts that knitted and crocheted squares are also welcome.

Now, as you know, I’m not the world’s greatest with a sewing machine, and although I would love to be able to create beautiful quilts, I need a lot of practice at piecing together the fabric to create the patchwork design.  So I thought this would be the perfect opportunity for me to practise, and above you can see my first completed square.  It features one Roman Stripe block I had left over from the quilt I started sixteen years ago and am only now finishing off. As you can see, my piecing is a couple of millilmeters off in the top left hand corner.  But hopefully, with time I’ll improve.  I’ve also completed another patch, which I’ll show you in a later post.

Thanks to Karen at Stitching Life who first brought Deborah’s Quilts of Hope project to my attention.

And finally – the Creative Every Day theme for February is night.  Somewhat tenuously… the connection is that the girls of Deborah House will be using these quilts at night time…  But I did want to spread the word, and hope someone viewing this via Creative Every Day will be persuaded to join in.  Click on the badge below to see how other participants have (more accurately!) interpreted the theme.