The Quaker Quilt!

The Lone Star Girl and the other lovely girl in our First Day School have been trying to work on the First Day Schools Peace Quilt project that I have posted about before. The idea was that the different First Day Schools in South Central Yearly Meeting would contribute squares and our Meeting's resident amazing quilter, a woman who made a beautiful quilt for the Lone Star Baby when she was born, would make a quilt of them, with our inexpert help. Friends in SCYM could donate money to get their names put on the border and the girls would donate the money to the American Friends Service Committee, to support their peace and justice work. It has been more than a year and is getting mighty close to Yearly Meeting and, until now, not much progress had been made. The girls made a few squares and the Friends Meeting of Austin's First Day School sent a square, but, until now, that was as far as the quilt had gotten.

On Sunday, though, as First Day School time was waning, our quilting Friend walked in with a miraculous bounty. Another Friend, from a Monthly Meeting in SCYM, someone that the girlsand I had never even met, had called me and told me that she was going to make quilt squares for all the Monthly Meetings in their Quarterly Meeting and give them to our quilting friend, who she knows, to pass on to us. That sounded very nice and I guess I was expecting four or five squares or so. Our Friend told us that this Friend said, however, that she couldn't stand for the girls not to get squares for their quilt so she made a square for every other Monthly Meeting in SCYM!!! It is going to be a big quilt now. An amazing one, too! This woman is an artist and she sewed together the most amazing squares you have ever seen! They are gorgeous! There is one for a Worship Group that has only one person in so it shows him with a flag on the moon. There are countless gorgeous, fascinating ones like that that depict things about each Meeting or the place where it meets. To me, the most amazing one is the one for the Friends Meeting of New Orleans which shows a house (a Meeting House?) with the waters receding...I start crying every time I think of it...

So. This project is not a First Day Schools project anymore, since this one amazing woman to whom we are so grateful made most of it, but it is still a Peace Quilt and we will get it made and give it to the Ministry and Care Committee of SCYM when it is all finished and the donation to the American Friends Service Committee is collected and sent, so that it can be passed around to the members of SCYM in need of nurturing...a Care Quilt.