Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands: community quilting

Showing posts with label community quilting. Show all posts

Sep 1, 2023

Bird Seed Bags and Other Fun

In Irish lore, February ushers in St. Brigid's Day and the beginning of Spring. In ancient Irish mythology Brigid was a fire goddess and she represents the Irish aspect of divine femininity. As the patron saint of babies, blacksmiths, boatmen, cattle farmers, dairy poultry farmers, farmers, printing presses, sailors, scholars, and even travelers.

My busy years of traveling back and forth continuous times in a year from Oregon to Alaska came to an end with the loss of my parents, but remembering them and missing them continues on in my heart.

In their honor, I made small format art quilts for donation to the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiation and the wonderful work of its founder, Ami Simms. Now, with both of them gone, I made small quilts for use by those with Alzheimer's Disease or related dementias.

January was my making month. I created and am or have given away 8 quilted items. The 9th I created and made for carrying those donations to and from my local Mid-Valley Quilt Guild.

For that purpose, I used re-purposed materials form our guilds 'free table' which gives our members a chance to donate any and all old materials they no longer have a need for. Most of the time, it shares very small bits and pieces that others don't necessarily want, so those items are often nabbed up by me and used for my small projects.

Here, I used cut off selvages and strips of fabric from pieces from that free table, as well as the larger scraps to create three mug mats.

But one month, a member had started to put together a vinyl bag made out of things like bird seed bags etc. With our love of birds, and the harbinger of Spring, I quickly found my own collection of plastic/vinyl bird seed and chicken seed bags, and created the 'Bird Seed Bag' seen below.

I made it quite large, so that it would be big enough to hold all of January's donations..5 Fidget Quilts and 3 mug rugs/mats that will be sold by our guild at its bi-annual quilt show to earn monies for our guild's charitable causes.

If you want to create your own re-cycled plastic bags into a large carry bag of your own..start saving just about anything! I save plasticized coffee sacks, cat food sacks, metalized candy bags..you name it!

Last year, I used Johnny Cat litter bags..remember it is made out of clay, a natural substance, and after all has not been used yet when you recycle those bags ;-) I combined it with a nicely handled bag that held oranges sold by the roadside. I made a gift for a family member whose cat was named Johnny to hold birthday gifts. My grandcat loved the bag and thought it was his!

Yes, I know, only someone like me even saves kitty litter bags ;-)

And a tip! When sewing on any of these materials use hair clippees to hold seams and bag hands, and sides of bags together. Pins leave permanent holes and unless you want a fresh air bag for your veggies, you might prefer it to be rain proof as you run in and out of many different places as I do!

Early harbingers of Spring..birds, and eggs, and re-creating fun materials into craft and quilting projects! And yes, I did make this little prayer flag garland out of maps and even those were free and re-purposed/recycled! In Spring, everything old is new again. Even if it's only Spring in Irish folklore!

LINKS:

Bags: Patterns, Tutorials, Links and Inspiration

Making Fidget Quilts for Alzheimer's Patients

Michele Bilyeu blogs With Heart and Hands as she shares a quilting journey from Alaska to Oregon with thousands of free Quilting, Sewing, and Crafting Patterns and Tutorials. Help change the world, one little quilt, art quilt, and prayer flag at a time!

Sep 11, 2021

Remembering 9/11/2001

I remember it all as if it was yesterday.

It was such an intensely sad yet overwhelmingly patriotic time. We were glued to the news day after day and all we could and do was pray and send love and light to the first responders, pray for miracles and survivors, their family and friends. New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC were in our hearts and on our minds.

I remember all the flags. Everyone found their flags and the US flag flew at every house and on every car--all of us all over the world. We just could not believe our eyes orvour ears. Disbelief was greater than fear. We were absolutely stunned watching the World Trade Center and the twin towers fall with immense horror as total disbelief enfolded minute by minute over the news. It took days, weeks, even months to piece events together and then when some explanations came in, years and years to attempt to understand any of it in any way.

We became one with one thought, one purpose, and one unified emotion.

If we could only regain all of the good that poured out between unified families, communities, states, and our nation today that we felt then. If we could feel all of that outpouring of love in thoughts, words, and deeds as we all sought to put thoughts into patriotic action. Our news every year if a replay of that fateful day. A day of memory to always remember and never forget.

Free Patriotic Quilt and Quilted Small Projects

Quilters patriotically quilted in legions united even more after 9-11 somehow. For every patriotic holiday or day of remembrance. I can remembe making and donating a lap quilt a week after Hurricane Katrina, after Rita, after the Oklahoma bombing of the Federal Building. Suddenly after September 11, 2001 we were truly The United States og America.

We sent them to Veterans hospitals and offices,, to care homes and individuals to people we knew and to total strangers.. Making flags and table runners and hotpads and mug wraps as a way of unifying hearts with hands and cities, States, and countries.

Oh my heart. Those were such deeply American deeply patriotic and deeply one Nation together under one God for All times. If only we all truly remembered, truly held on to that unity and unification of minds, bodies and spirits.

Michele Bilyeu Creates *With Heart and Hands*:

My Quilting, Sewing, and Crafting Tutorial Link Lists:

By Themes

The September 11 attacks, often referred to as 9/11, were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks by the militant Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda against the United States of America on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

Date: September 11, 2001, 5:46 AM PDT

Perpetrators: Osama bin Laden; Ayman al-Zawahiri; Al-Qaeda; (see also: responsibility and hijackers)

Number of deaths: 2,996

Location: World Trade Center, New York, Manhattan, Shanksville, Stonycreek Township, More

Follow With Heart and Hands Blog on Feedspot

Currently fluctuating between #32 and #56 . Just scroll their site until you find me (look for my pink and wine art quilt logo) and hit subscribe in their feed.

If you're on Google or Google blogger, use this sites "Friends Connect" side bar gadget.

Free Patriotic Quilt and Quilted Small Projects

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting... from my heart and with my hands

May 13, 2021

Quilting, Crafting and Sewing: ADD or OCD ?

Or is 'Quilter's ADD' really 'OCD'?

We can all be a little of either or both
about quilting and many of us about fabric shopping. But are we guilty of a truly "Obsessive Disorder?

Or are we just opportunistic? We see something we could use and we have to have it? Or we're feeling low, missing our old lives, or younger years ?

Are we just "fabric collectors" and "appreciaters" who want to touch, sniff, and pet our lovely comforting fabrics or psychos who at any minute that might start screaming out loud "Because I need this much that's why to do what I do!" Or really are we just competitive winners whose mantra is "the one who dies with the most fabric wins!"

Read the rest at my #1 post for all of last year❣

Michele Bilyeu Creates *With Heart and Hands*: Quilter's ADD:

Most Stash, She Won!

https://www.with-heart-and-hands.com/2013/03/quilters-add.html

Jun 30, 2019

Healing Hearts Textile Arts

My personal path has always centered around the simplest acts of service.

Of being there for and with others as a lifetime of ever transmuting fears or anger or pain into creative work that has been part of my heart and my healing arts journey since I was a very young child.

How do we find our center in this incred-ibly unbalanced world with false idols of ego,success,and power creating a lack of balance in our values and priorities that often fracture our childhood dreams and set us astray from our true soul's journey?

It's truly the simple things from my heart and with my hands that connect me to my soul's purpose and that is the spiritual catalyst for the alchemical manifestation of love in action.

For only love crosses all dimensions of time and space.

Only love will survive when ego, money, power, and success are lost or stripped away. Only love is left when all else is gone. when we transition from this life, this dimension and from our individual perception of whatever reality we have created and energized into manifestation.

Love is all there truly is and all that we are truly meant to learn about and to experience as we navigate what is often very intensely painful or emotionally challenging lives.

It is simply who I am and what I was meant to be and to do as I combined it bit by bit in all aspects of my life

I learned early on that my gifts with "healing with heart and hands" work.

True healing comes from above, from within, and from all around.

It is simply pure and sacred healing heart's love in whatever form one needs when anger, pain, loss or grief is too over-whelming for our mere mortal forms to bear.

Its work and its need in this world is greater than the sum of its parts.

I wanted to work in a transpersonsal way with all who came into my world. So, on October 26, 2006 I created a very, very simple blog and I started blogging.

I could barely figure out how to even use that early blogspot format, had no training and no help whatsoever and created this huge, huge complicated thing that turned into my own domain and in all senses of the word.

For me, blogging was about letting go of my private little space in the world and walk among humanity, often with my heart completely exposed, into the whole world.

It was about letting go of control, of the mastery of anything and everything, and learning to just enter the spaces between the real world of pain and suffering and sadness and finding a deeper solace in what we do have, can do and can share, instead of all that we do not.

No matter what anyone says or writes, when you give from your heart over and over if you do not replenish your spirit, it exhausts you. And because I believed that this form of universal ministering (keeping in mind it is non-denominational in all ways) was my life's purpose.

I learned to open to gratitude and compliments on my then very simple blog posts and make friends in a world I wasnt really a part of until I reached out and joined in.

When I realized that I needed a different way to work physically, spiritually, and energetically with my gifts, I used my scraps or donated or repurposed fabrics to sew and share really, really simple little quilts.

And then when they were done, I loved even the simplest of them so very much that I just knew they were filled up with love. And then, loving them so much, I gave them away to others.

The only ones I've kept are examples to teach or to share or to encourage others others to do the same. My nicest, hardest ones that took an eternity to make; I gave away as gifts.

My own 3 grown kids only have simple scrap quilts but all 3 grandkids got special artsy ones just for them.

Making Fidget Quilts for Alzheimer's Patients

Making an Alaskan Kuspuk

With my passion for sewing and quilting, I realized that I could reach more people and infuse more goodness into my work by the creation of quilts, pillows, kuspuks, prayer pocket pillows, and prayer flags, than I could by helping people one-on-one

And this became my own healing journey. True healing is not just of the body and all of the aches and pains and all of the ills that beset it. True healing is finding your way, your path, your journey that goes out beyond the ego's desires for acceptance, approval, applause or accolades.

It is about doing what you were meant to do, beginning with understanding why you are where you are, right now in this time in this place wherever that is in your life.

Once I understood that for me the path was about creativity combined with family, heart, voicing my inner truth and sharing that truth with others I could see a pattern that begin as a child and moved and grew as I did and as I learned to create in the all of the ways that I have.

Initially, back in the 70's and early 80's, I made the simplest of quilts and patchwork pillows. Beginning with one of every design in the "Quilts, Quilts, Quilts" book.(when it finally came out). Those pillows ended up on the reading couches of elementary and middle schools in the Salem, Oregon area.

Later, I began to make and then give away my quilts, first simply made, and then with more detail and creative patchwork. I've given to survivors of natural disasters - hurricanes, fires, floods, and tornadoes.

When Hurricane Katrina, and then Rita, hit the Gulf states in 2005, I sent 6 quilts within a month, and 25 of my own quilts within a year's time. After those initial delivery trucks winded down, I made them for the Salem Interfaith Ministry - a group of many religious and spiritual denominations who jointly banded together, and help others as needed.

I knew then that I could sew quilts, pillows, bags, clothing, and prayer flags, and give them to others in need and that the wonderful feeling that the giving gave back to me, was far greater than winning awards, or writing a book, or receiving personal recognition in any way! It was just deeply moving and made me truly happy inside!

I've made quilts for a number of hospitals in a number of states, for several organizations that help abused children, for mission trips to Africa and other countries, for programs to help mothers and children leaving abusive situations, children in foster care, and those in need of all ages from neo-natal preemies, to the elderly in hospitals or in need of a passage quilt in hospice care.

It is by far the most meaningful giving I have done after a lifetime of volunteer work in schools and social service organizations from Alaska to Oregon. While being in the education field taught me about community -both families and individuals.

It is my own personal non-denominational healing ministry that has, by far, taught me and given back to me, the very most of all.

Whether we give a quilt to comfort, or to wrap up and warm, or help buffer the pain of a hurting and loss filled heart, all such quilts given with love and made with both our hands and our hearts are 'healing hearts' quilts. But my quilts are made with the infusion of my own natural healing touch/non-touch/non-local healing energies.

A huge blessing, a gift that I was born with, but that I later learned was inherited from my paternal grand-mother from Finland

Later, many of my tiny art quilts were given to charitable organizations to raise funds for research, but even then, those tiny art quilts still go to someone who has found a heartstring connection and meaning from that quilt to their own heart, for we have all shared in love and loving, loss and losing of those loved ones that truly are the very deepest and most meaning filled parts of our selves.

As long as it was in operation, I made and donated small format art quilts to the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative for research funding to major studies all over the United States and then to to even greater sharing.

It brought my own hurting heart great peace and comfort. 16 members of my own family have faced the dreadful disease of Alzheimer's (12 with my immediate DNA) and now almost all of those beloved family members have passed.

I ended up creating and donating 75 tiny 8"x 11" or smaller quilts to this group, even as I traveled back and forth to Alaska to care for my parents for as much as 6 months a year and up to 4 trips a year. I still somehow made and donated quilts. If there is a will, there IS a way! When I broke and wrist by slipping on black ice in Alaska,, i still cared for my parents with 1 hand. Cooking, cleaning, doing laundry and giving medications and insulin shots to my mom..

And in the process, I not only learned just how much more I was personally capable of, but i personally earned $5,000 as my mailed and donated quilts were sold, along with a kazillion others from all over the world in the online AAQI monthly auctions.

What a blessing in every way you can imagine for all of us as it kept our hearts wide open and our minds focused and our hands creatively very busy!

Even breaking and dislocating my wrist and requiring immediate surgery didn't stop me. Within two weeks I was sewing with one hand, and three months, creating adult bibs for my mom and designing quilts for AAQI, and helping Alaskan school children design and sew their own kuspuks!

Faith and growth and strength of character grows by believing and being and just doing!

So, if you think you don't have the time, or have other challenges, if I can do it, so can you! Here's just some of my donations to a variety of causes and projects:

Make a simple fabric postcard, a pillowcase, a journal cover, a little heart shaped pillow, an adult bib for a nursing home patient, or any other gift from your heart.

Recyclable-giveaway Cloth Shopping Bag