Quilts for Kids

Recently I became aware of a wonderful project called Quilts for Kids.

You can access all the information about becoming involved with this group at this website:
http://www.quiltsforkids.org/news/4/touch-of-comfort-partnership-with-downy
Sign up and they will send you a kit of fantastic colorful fabric designed to make a child's eyes lighten up as soon as they know this is "their new quilt"

P&G's Downy Fabric Softener Creates the Downy 'Touch of Comfort' Program to
help Provide Quilts to Hospitalized Children

'Grey's Anatomy'Star Chandra Wilson Joins Downy and Quilts for Kids, Inc. to
Help Deliver Quilts to Children in Children's Miracle Network Hospitals
throughout the United States

About Quilts for Kids, Inc.
Quilts for Kids, Inc. is a non-profit organization that transforms
discontinued designer fabrics into quilts that comfort hospitalized children
suffering from life-threatening illnesses as well children of abuse.

Headquartered in Yardley, PA, Quilts for Kids, Inc. was founded in August 2000
by Linda Arye. The organization was established with hopes of comforting
children hospitalized with life threatening illnesses by providing a hand made
patchwork quilt. These quilts are created by caring volunteer quilters
nationwide who wish to make a difference in the lives of these hospitalized
children. Since then, the charity has distributed over 50,000 quilts
worldwide and saved millions of pounds of fabric from landfills. Quilts for
Kids, Inc. is associated with children's hospitals throughout the United
States and has 50 chapters throughout North America.

Because of allergens, children often cannot bring their stuffed animals to the
hospital. However, most hospitals and treatment centers welcome the Quilts for
Kids, Inc. washable, all-cotton quilts, which kids can hold onto for security
and comfort.

I have copied the above information from the website to make sure I had everything correctly done. I have just received my first kit from this very worthwhile project headquarters and the fabric is beautiful.
So far this month I have made 4 quilts for our local charitable donation project and will make another one to accompany this Downy quilt to a new home.

Sign up to make a couple! Your soul will feel so good!

A new idea for fun!

Here is a new idea for a fun quilt which I just found on the stashbusters website. A family reunion quilt! and I think this is definitely doable for our next big get-together next year!

Check it out at this website: http://creativechicksatplay.blogspot.com


I tried this and it worked for me..let me know if you have a problem. Once you are on the site look for the family reunion quilt info!
You will have to look way down on the right side to find the listing for quilts, click there and then go down to the 6th one on the list, the family reunion quilt and there it is! This blogspot has a LOT of info for fun projects. I hope you enjoy it!

My fun landscape quilts

Clay's Village Greeting

One of the parts of quilting that I really enjoy is making small artsy landscape quilted wallhangings.

The first one I ever made was done at the request of one of my grandsons. Now a tall handsome young man of 16, but once a little kid who loved seeing his name on things!
He asked me to make him a picture quilt which included so many things I had to write them down to keep track of them all. First and foremost was an airplane in the sky pulling a banner that said "Happy Birthday Clay"!




So that was where I started--with a piece of beautiful blue fabric with fluffy white clouds, an airplane and a banner. All of this took me a couple days to accomplish, by the time I fussy cut the airplane, and embroidered out the words to make the banner!

The fabric that I have used for most of my little quilts is made by Cranston Mills and I bought it at Wal-Mart. Now that Wal-Mart is enlarging their stores, but diminishing their craft departments most of the stores are no longer carrying this fabric and it is becoming much more difficult to find "picture" fabric.

But for me, for the last few years it has worked fine. I have saved even little pieces of the scraps hoping to find a use for them in other small quilts.

Then we had to have a village with buildings and people and animals and water--somewhere!, and trees and flowers. He was 10 and his imagination was endless and exciting, filled with energy!



After doing all of this, his next instructions were to put a village on the bottom of the
picture. So I did! and here is the finished product! which he still has hanging on his bedroom wall after 10 years!





The next blog will be about the companion piece that almost matches this one!

A new day to celebrate!

How many times have you been all ready for the day or a night out, gotten all dressed in your favorite outfit , then realized that you are missing an earring that matches your outfit?

I must have about a dozen of what I am calling "orphan" earrings in my jewelry box. I wonder why we keep them? thinking perhaps the lost one will show up as if by magic the next time we want to wear them? That has only happened to me once, when my husband found a poor lost soul out in the driveway about a week after it disappeared!

So I am hereby proclaiming Thursday as the day to celebrate the disappearance of all

lost earrings and declaring each and every Thursday as "wear an orphan earring" day.
I hereby give you, each and everyone of you, permission to wear two different earrings on Thursday and discover the joy of being different!

If anybody asks why you are wearing two different earrings, simply say...oh, yes I have another pair just like these, somewhere! and who knows someone else might be wearing them!

Another FROG story! Froggie goes acourting!

One of the projects in our local quilt guild is a challenge each year with an unusual fabric. A couple years ago we were given a colorful piece that included frogs sitting in a floating ring and on lilypads, with water bubbling around everything.

I was at my wit's end to come up with a plan for this piece of fun fabric until I remembered my neice who loves frogs! and games and was moving soon into a new house! The perfect housewarming gift would be a new game.

So I decided to make a real "frog" game where "Jumping" determines who wins!

I cut out the frogs using a very distinctive design....I drew around a drinking glass works every time! Then I drew circles on some green fabric, from my stash, of course!
Actually I cut out two green circles for each frog. Put them together with a small magnetic circle in the middle and sewed that to the frog pieces, serging around the outside of the circle. (I used magnetic circles with adhesive on one side and then sewed by hand around each one.)

Then I found some more green fabric and made lily pad designs and put them together the same way...with the magnets all hand sewn in the middle.


Now all we needed was a home for the frogs and the lily pads. I did extensive research on the design and sizes of various checkerboards. I measured at least 3 different boards and decided that it should be in various colors of blue and green. Found the colors I liked and went for it.

All that was left to do was to put a tie string on each end. Oh yes I almost forgot...I also put small magnetic circles in each block on the board. So that when the frogs jumped they would have some place to land.

When you play the game, you can fold it carefully with all the pieces inside, tie it all up and use it as a travel game.

Since this is not trademarked, or patented, or any of that other legalese mumbo-jumbo, feel free to copy and make your own "Froggie goes acourting Checkerboard".
Happy Jumping to all! ps you can click on each picture to see it larger!

The Wonder of Air Conditioning

After writing my previous blog, I started to think about the things we take for granted these days. Air conditioning is definitely one of those items.

So I went to that great fount of wisdom--google search--which lead me to Wikipedia, where I found the following information.

"The concept of air conditioning is known to have been applied in Ancient Rome, where aqueduct water was circulated through the walls of certain houses to cool them. Similar techniques in medieval Persia involved the use of cisterns and wind towers to cool buildings during the hot season. Modern air conditioning emerged from advances in chemistry during the 19th century, and the first large-scale electrical air conditioning was invented and used in 1902 by Willis Haviland Carrier.

While moving heat via machinery to provide air conditioning is a relatively modern invention, the cooling of buildings is not. Wealthy ancient Romans circulated aqueduct water through walls to cool their luxurious houses.

The 2nd century Chinese inventor Ding Huan (fl. 180) of the Han Dynasty invented a rotary fan for air conditioning, with seven wheels 3 m (10 ft) in diameter and manually powered. In 747, Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–762) of the Tang Dynasty (618–907) had the Cool Hall (Liang Tian) built in the imperial palace, which the Tang Yulin describes as having water-powered fan wheels for air conditioning as well as rising jet streams of water from fountains. During the subsequent Song Dynasty (960–1279), written sources mentioned the air conditioning rotary fan as even more widely used.

Medieval Persia had buildings that used cisterns and wind towers to cool buildings during the hot season: cisterns (large open pools in central courtyards, not underground tanks) collected rain water; wind towers had windows that could catch wind and internal vanes to direct the airflow down into the building, usually over the cistern and out through a downwind cooling tower. Cistern water evaporated, cooling the air in the building.

Ventilators were invented in medieval Egypt and were widely used in many houses throughout Cairo during the Middle Ages. These ventilators were later described in detail by Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi in 1200, who reported that almost every house in Cairo has a ventilator, and that they cost anywhere from 1 to 500 dinars depending on their sizes and shapes. Most ventilators in the city were oriented towards the Qibla, as was the city in general"

There is a lot of information there on that site. And interestingly enough it mentions that "in 1906, Stuart W. Cramer of Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, was exploring ways to add moisture to the air in his textile mill. Cramer coined the term "air conditioning", using it in a patent claim he filed that year as an analogue to "water conditioning", then a well-known process for making textiles easier to process. He combined moisture with ventilation to "condition" and change the air in the factories, controlling the humidity so necessary in textile plants. Willis Carrier adopted the term and incorporated it into the name of his company. This evaporation of water in air, to provide a cooling effect, is now known as evaporative cooling."

So I bet you thought this had nothing to do with quilting or fabric use!!! Wrong!!
Where would we be without air conditioning helping us as we struggle with that quilt in all the heat and humidity as I did yesterday. On the hottest day of the year, so far in Ohio, I was finishing up a huge quilt. Without the AC....I would have been TOAST!