From Janet Wickell,
Your Guide to Quilting.
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Charity Quilts

Quilters everywhere make charity quilts (often called comfort quilts) for all sorts of causes. It's an activity that continues to increase now that it's so easy for quilters to "meet" online to convey needs and brainstorm ideas.

• Thousands of quilts were made for Katrina survivors. In fact, that quilt drive is still taking place.

• Quilts of Valor are made by quilters who are dedicated to providing comfort for wounded soldiers.

• Project Linus has chapters all over the world. It's volunteers are sometimes called blanketeers, and provide hand made blankies of all kinds for ill and traumatized children.

• During some months, our Block Lotto hostess collects extra quilt blocks and sends them to a forum member. The member assembles one or more quilts for charity.

Research church groups, quilting guilds and other organizations in your area to find groups of quilters who make quilts to be distributed locally.

About.com Forum Quilters

In the spring of 2007, I met some of our About Quilting forum members at a quilting seminar in North Carolina. We spent one evening making baby quilts for The Grace Children's Foundation, a non-profit group that delivers aid of all types to orphaned and abandoned children in China.

It was so much fun for me to finally have real faces and voices to link with the names of forum members I talk to every day, and being in the same room made it a breeze to sew the quilts together in assembly-line fashion.

Making charity quilts is an activity many of our members are devoted to, and we hope more and more quilters will participate in charity activities in their own home towns. A large number of our Forum Members are already very active in charity quilt drives.