Preparations for the Big Quilt Give-Away 2021

I made up just over 100 coupons for the social services agency to give away. I have never had more than that actually given away, so I didn’t see any point in giving them 175 or so. I then contacted people personally that I know.

I have spent quite a bit of time this week getting ready for the Give-Away which is Saturday.

On Sunday after church we set up the chairs and started putting quilts on the chairs. Sadly I forgot my phone at home that day so no photos of that day’s work.

Since Monday was a holiday, all I did was work on the coupons that I made up to take to the social services agency so they could give them away to people they know.

On Tuesday morning after finishing printing out the coupons, I went to the agency and put about 100+ coupons in the hands of a worker.

Due to COVID, they’ve changed how they are working - people aren’t able to get in and take the coupons by themselves anymore. They are making people jump through some hoops in order to get to the offers of help.

 

Then, later on in the day, I spent quite a bit of time using Messenger letting some people I’ve worked with before know that we were having a give-away.

Since this time I have 218 quilts (!) to give away, I know that it is going to be some work. However, there is no point in just having these quilts sit at the church building over the winter. I don’t mind have SOME leftover, but I don’t want to have more than half, for sure!

Here in Poland, we have quite a few immigrant families who often are quite poor (understatement!) and I could always send my quilts their way. However, I really made these with the Polish people in our area in mind. I do NOT mind giving them to anyone in need, however.

 

On Thursday I went back to the church and set things up better than the way we left it on Sunday.

Here is how it looked when I got there. This is how we left it on Sunday.

I decided I didn’t want to leave the layout like this.

I put up two tables on the side of the main auditorium to put the larger quilts on and made the back room for the quilts I think of as children’s quilts.

Let me show you. The Main Auditorium:

The main auditorium is the single size adult/tween/anyone quilts - everything except the ones with children’s motifs on them.

I put the queen size quilts on tables on the right. It is hard to drape such large quilts over a chair. That’s why I decided on the tables.

Here is a close up of those queen size quilts on the table.:

There are 13 quilts on these two tables.

As you look back towards the back of the building, I put all the children’s quilts there.

There are more children’s quilts behind where I’m standing and on my right of this photo.

I had realized kind of late in the year this year that I didn’t really have a lot of children’s quilts. I will fix that for the year 2022. I had had so many children’s quilts in previous years that I’m okay with having fewer.

Once a quilt is taken from the table or chairs, we will replace them. We think this is enough choice for people. Giving TOO many choices makes it too difficult to choose which one they prefer.

I made a short little video for you to see a bit better and maybe more up close. It’s less than a minute long.

And there you are! Saturday is coming soon - and I’ll be sure to show you more pictures afterwards.

I still have a lot of quilts upstairs in the room. I’ll have help bringing them down from the room upstairs on Saturday!

 

Have a great day wherever you are reading this! Thanks for coming along with me on my quilting/sewing journey!

Becky Petersen10 Comments