Rojo Rojo Orphanage nearly completed

On 18th September we drew the raffle for the quilt at a Quilt Exhibition put on by my group The Village Quilters.  247 visitors came and viewed our quilts and we served tea in the garden, raising £500 for the orphanage and £250 for the local church. The quilt was won by someone from Ticehurst so I was pleased it went to a fairly local home .  The final total raised by the raffle was £5295 which exceeded all my expectations.  Since writing the previous blog I had spent the summer selling tickets to friends, had displayed the quilt at five local fetes and a couple of village markets, and was very lucky to have a stand at the NEC Festival of Quilts for four days in august. All in all it had been a great experience and I met so many generous people and so many new projects have snowballed from it.  A quilter who I met at Birmingham has offered to hold a quilters tea party this month in aid of the orphanage, a friend sold cards at her open studio for Rojo, a fabric company have donated fabric to make things to sell for Rojo, there has been a bridge drive, a local school has forged a link with the orphans, and a local patchwork class has been started, all small events that will make a huge difference to our continued fund raising before we can install the orphans in their new home.  If anyone reading this wants to help with quilt projects, please contact kilifiqs@btinternet.com  or to help in any other way please contact aid4rojo@aim.com  To follow our progress please go to  http://www.aid4rojo.co.uk/ .   

Making a quilt for Rojo Rojo

We set up Kilifi Quilt Support in November 2009 as a response to my cousin Sarah's setting up http://www.aid4rojo.co.uk/ following her trip to Kenya where she met the villagers of Rojo Rojo, a small village near Kilifi, who need funds to build an orphanage for twelve children in the village whose parents had died of HIV related diseases.  Joseph Ndaa, the elected community leader of Rojo Rojo showed Sarah his 5 acre plot of land, no longer sustainable for growing crops due to drought, on which he hoped to build the orphanage, and Sarah left Kenya with a promise to help. 

Since I am a quilter I decided the best way for me to help was to make a patchwork quilt to raffle for the project.  Since I wanted it to appeal to as many people as possible, I decided to use Liberty fabrics left over from previous dressmaking projects from when I lived in the middle east, and more that I had collected over the years.

The first thing was to choose a pattern for the quilt which would be easy to use and which would show off the liberty fabrics, which being liberty designs, would all blend easily and hopefully make an attractive quilt without too much painful choosing of colours involved.  I also wanted it to be a fairly simple design, being well aware of the 'quilt police' who may be scrutinising every join if I were to show it in the quilt world!

I decided to adapt a pattern from Pam & Nicky Lintott's 'Jelly Roll Quilts' called Blue Lagoon, which was basically a geometric four patch design made from the strips normally pre-cut in a jelly roll.  In this case however I was going to have to iron and cut all the strips from the oddments of liberty material collected.  The next stage was to sew the strips together, and cut them to make two patch blocks, and then join those blocks with others to make four patch blocks. You also need a number of single blocks which are set inbetween the four patch blocks.

 This all takes longer than you think but it is very satisfying when it all comes together.  Meanwhile I had bought a lovely off white material with tiny white spots on for the background fabric from The Quilt Room, Dorking.  The worst bit I found was sewing all the rows together as you initially pin the seams to match, then you sew them, only to find the pin moves whilst you are doing it and the blocks don't line up, in which case you have to unpick and do them again, and sometimes again. This probably doesnt happen to other people but it certainly did to me! 

Finally I had the quilt in one piece and then the next tedious bit  was sandwiching the three layers together.  I used a 2oz polyester wadding and found a nice cream backing, tacked the whole thing every two inches both ways having laid it out on the floor where it remained for a few days, then it was ready to  quilt.  The only thing was, I realised I hadn't properly measured the finished size that I wanted the quilt to be as, when I put it on the bed, it didnt cover the pillows at the top! I then realised I had  to make another five rows which I then  added on to the bottom of the quilt, also adding on more wadding and backing.  Life would be much simpler if I was any good at maths, but this sort of thing happens quite often in my quiltmaking. 

However, once tacked, quilting the quilt became a pleasure as I realised there were no difficult shapes to quilt, just the straight lines up and down the blocks, the only fiddly bit being the four patches themselves, and I spent many hours chatting to others as I quilted away happily, the border being the final touch.  By the beginning of May, the quilt was ready to display, and hopefully, draw people to buy tickets.  I had spent some time thinking of all the places I would try and do this, and in the end decided to try and show it at local fetes over the summer and also to hold various events at my home where I could entertain friends and hope they would buy lots of tickets.  I photographed it in early June when my roses were out.