“Simple Gifts†Free Charity Quilt Pattern from Project Linus
“Card Trick Baby Quilt†Free Charity Quilt Pattern designed by Bobbi Janik from Project Linus
“Easy Preemie Quilt†Free Charity Quilt Pattern designed by the Fraser Valley Quilters Guild, Surrey, British Columbia from Project Linus
“Scrappy Bricks†Free Charity Quilt Pattern for a child AZ Blankets 4 Kids
“Picture Frames†Free Charity Quilt Pattern for an infant up to a teen from AZ Blankets 4 Kids
When your daughter asks you to make a quilt, there is no better compliment. When she asks you to make her a quilt for a charity that she’s involved with, it takes it to a higher level!
For her freshman year of college at Tarleton State University (TSU) in 2017, she was the Hall Council Chair for the Honors College with the Residence Hall Association (RHA). She asked me to make a quilt that they could raffle off to the students, to bring more recognition to RHA. As we talked more and more about it, and as she talked with the RHA board of directors, they decided they’d like to have a quilt that included the logos of a number of groups around campus as well as the core values of the university.
They sent me the logos and I hired a digitizer to create the files that would work with my embroidery machine. Some of them worked the first time she digitized them. Unfortunately, for many of them, we had to go back and forth – her digitizing, me test-stitching, just to get them correct. But in the end, I met my deadline and the quilt was delivered with plenty of time for the RHA to raffle it off!
And just to add another kudo to my dear friend Meloney, her longarm quilting was icing on the Tarleton State University RHA raffle quilt cake!
RHA raffle quilt with the core values and 12 logos of TSU
Closeup of a TSU logo on the RHA raffle quilt
RHA quilt on the bed of the young lady who won it in the raffle
I’d also like to take just a wee bit of credit as my daughter received the Hall Council Chair award with the RHA at the end of her freshman year, and she was voted in as the vice president of the RHA for her sophomore year at TSU!
My article in the September 2016 issue of American Quilter is the article that started it all. In the fall of 2015, Nancy Ottaviano, owner of Love Quilting, said she wrote an article that was very personal to her but she had submitted it to magazine after publication after magazine and was rejected from every single place she’d submitted it to. She asked me if I would take a look at it and see if I could rewrite it and submit it around to see if it would get published.
It wasn’t because I was somebody in the professional world of quilting or had been published – I just happened to be the one she chose to share her article with. Admittedly, her education and career leaned toward technical writing and not more journalistic writing. So when I say I looked at her article and nodded my head throughout the entire thing, it meant I could definitely tell why her article was rejected over and over again.
To say the least, I was intrigued. I was willing to see what I could do with the article and how I could use it to enrich the lives of those who read it. The first thing I did was to send out a call to my Facebook friends, asking for people I could interview regarding ovarian cancer. One lady was a friend from Utah (we lived there for seven years) and one was a cousin who had an aunt who would be happy to talk to me.
Once I had all of the parts and pieces together to write my article, it came together in a matter of minutes. In fact, what took the longest was sending the article back and forth to the three ladies to make sure I had their ‘voice’ correct!
Approval was granted and I submitted the article to JUST. ONE. MAGAZINE – American Quilter. No rhyme or reason for choosing that magazine and no rhyme or reason as to why I didn’t submit it to more than one publication. I just did what I felt was right.
The magazine’s submission page says it takes about a month for approval or rejection. Frankly, after a month, I didn’t think about it – didn’t cross my mind again. UNTIL. And that is a huge UNTIL because I DID finally think of them a couple of months later…when I received approval for them to publish my article!!! I cannot tell you how excited I was but the emotions that came through from my email to and from Nancy will be forever part of my memory. She was so excited that her mother’s memory would grace the pages of a quilt magazine, she cried. She said she pinched herself more than once, just to make sure it was real. And I felt extremely blessed that *I* was the one to help make this happen for her. For all three of my contacts, one who passed away of ovarian cancer before her voice was heard by the quilt community.
I get so very tickled when I see a new issue of American Quilter magazine show up in our mailbox! My articles in them for 2016 are all written toward a personal passion of mine. The July issue’s “Year of Giving” article focuses on “No Foster Child Left Behind.” As many of you may know, I was a foster child from the age of 11 until I turned 18. There is no better reason to jump in and make quilts for foster kids – they need them, they treasure them, they provide them with a sense of security and they are *always* cherished and loved. I pray my fellow quilters can join the cause to leave no foster child behind.
