Getting ready for National Day of Service!

Hi, everyone! So many of you have responded saying that you would like to spend some time on MLK Day doing some quilting for charity. Awesome! Even if you don't have the time that day, I hope you'll think about becoming involved in some charitable quilting of some sort. If you don't have time to make a quilt, you might consider making a block. Clare collects them for Quilts 4 Leukaemia and the Heartstrings Quilt Project does, too. Check their websites for details.

If you do some charity quilting on MLK Day, please post about it on your blog and let me know so I can put a link to it from my blog. It'll be wonderful to see what everyone has done! Michele at With Hearts and Hands has posted a list of people who are doing charitable quilting that day -- check it out! Even if you are not in the US, please consider participating -- there is a need everywhere.

I responded to everyone who left a comment that they wanted to quilt for charity on MLK Day, and I would have liked to post more links and updates on the Day of Service, but I was down this week with some sort of miserable virus. Our furnace broke, too, but my own personal thermostat was so off kilter between fever and chills that I didn't even notice! Fortunately DH did, and he's the one who had to stay up until midnight while the furnace guy fixed things. DH said the repairman just shrugged off being called out so late, saying it came with his career choice. I'm glad he was willing to work nights because we couldn't wait until morning -- the outside temp had dropped to -16F (that's -27C) and we we were afraid the pipes would freeze.

Since I didn't get any quilting done myself -- charity or otherwise -- I thought I'd give you a tour of my guild's Project Linus stash and works in progress.

We have a finished basement that became my sewing area when the girls left for college and I took up quilting. I volunteered to house the fabrics that guild members donated to Project Linus. As you can see, we have a lot! And we use it.

Here are some piles of projects underway -- tops that need batting and backing, tops ready for quilting, quilted tops that need binding, donated quilts that need a little fixing, great fabrics that need a special pattern rather than one of our standards (we call those "Get Creative" quilts). You can see our finished red and turquoise fungly top in the foreground -- still has to be quilted.
This big roll of batting was a donation from a batting company. We are very appreciative because batting is expensive. Unfortunately, the batting is only 36" (a scant meter) wide, and our standard quilts are 40" x 60", which means we have to piece it! Eek! I see a piecing party in our future!
But this is the only piecing I managed to do this week. These were supposed to be put together as leaders and enders while I worked on another project, but I was so frustrated at not being up to any real quilting that I took 5 minutes and strip pieced them. At least I got something done!