Hello all, Mary Ellen here.

I’m pleased with the response to the sunflowers for Ukraine idea that I floated in my last post. Here are my tentative thoughts on how to go forward.

I will be calling BNHV this morning to try to get a time soon when we could meet to talk over this project. My other guild (papercrafters) is not using our March meeting allotment, so hopefully I’ll be able to snag us a time.

My tentative plan is for us to make an assortment of table runners, toppers and other small projects. When selling tickets for our guild’s bed size quilts I’ve been told different times that the quilt doesn’t match their color scheme, or that they don’t need a full size quilt. Hopefully summer/fall table pieces could find homes in many places. We’ll discuss if we want to do several small raffles or just sell them out right. We could have sales of raffle tickets or the pieces themselves at the theme days the museum will be running through their season.

I am going to contact Journey’s End, the refugee help organization here in Buffalo, to offer our proceeds to them and to get their permission to use their name in our promotions.

I will be writing up directions for several different sunflower blocks. I would like them to be made scrappy so that they can be mixed in the projects. I will be hoping to first find volunteers to make blocks, then later to sew the runners or toppers, then to layer and quilt them, and finally to bind them. I’m hoping that volunteers would find the different steps to be manageable so we can get lots of guild participation. I personally am feeling that this is something-although small- that I can do to help those who are suffering so much in Ukraine. Perhaps others will feel this too.

I’m hoping to have at least one of the block patterns ready at tomorrow night’s guild meeting.

On a different topic–I just finished binding one of the samples that I will be showing in the early bird demo tomorrow night. I finish most of my bindings by machine–and I won at binding chicken. Look! Yay for me!