Kasson, MN Sew-In

We had a wonderful time on Saturday. Sheree was the perfect hostess and she wrote the following summary to share here. You can see all the photos from the sew-in at the slide-show posted on our website.


Saturday, October 20, 2007 was the third meeting for the Minnesota/WI/Upper Midwest HeartStringers. Mary, Sue & Barb, all from the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN met Sheree in SE Minnesota for a VERY productive day of quilting pink. Ann, who is part of the HeartString Yahoo Group, and who lives in nearby Byron, MN came by with 50! blocks. Some of Sheree’s friends also stopped by and added to the fun and productivity of the group. And we were international with virtual quilters from Australia and the UK, not to mention others quilting pink throughout the US.

The blocks and tops we worked on will all be donated to breast cancer patients and were created from pink and white fabrics in support of October being Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Our group of fabulous women put together 2 quilt tops from blocks brought to the sew-in, and completed 118 more blocks!

Additionally, the work HeartStrings does will be featured in the local weekly newspaper! All-in-all, it was a Heart warming experience as we spent the day enjoying each other’s company creating instruments of comfort for those who will need a soft place to land and the warmth that a quilt sewn with love can supply.

Will you be joining us?

Don’t forget our MN area sew-in this coming Saturday. Details can be found at this previous post.

For those of you not able to attend in person, consider joining us on a virtual retreat and make HeartStrings blocks at home. You can either sew pink blocks for our October Project Pink or use the guidelines and sew our regular blocks.

Make sure you write in and tell us what you worked on!

Country Crossroads Quilt Guild

After seeing the 5th HeartStrings quilt (pictured above) from Joanne and her guild I asked her to write a brief note telling us about the HeartStrings quilts they’ve been making. This is what she wrote:

The Country Crossroads Quilt Guild of Forreston, Illinois does a special charity project every 3 years. (We are a small guild of about 60 members).

This year it was decided to donate quilts to the Rockford Rescue Mission. The RRM requested twin size quilts. I made a string quilt using the Heartstrings Quilt Project guidelines, quilted it on my new longarm (quilting on charity quilts is great practice), and brought it to guild to donate.

I suggested to the members that if they wanted to make the Heartstring blocks, I’d assemble them, quilt and bind them and hopefully bring one back every month. One month I used 50 blocks that were donated to the project and sent to me by Sue, but every other month the guild has managed to make enough for a quilt.

I received October’s donation of 90+ blocks and have the first quilt on the longarm now. The extra blocks will be made into a smaller quilt to be donated to one member’s husband, who is a county deputy sheriff, to keep in his squad car to comfort a child when needed. The twin size will be the 6th quilt we’ve made this year for RRM.

Purple Project Update

Members continue to finish and donate quilts from our recent Purple Project. Here’s one finished and posted by Jennifer. She used blocks she pieced and donated blocks to make 4 Purple Project quilts. You can see these and all the purple quilts in our online album.

If you’re participating in October’s Project Pink and need some inspiration check out these finished tops and quilts. Details for participating in this project can be found in this information sheet.

As always even with a special project going on, we continue to accept red and blue center string blocks made according to the guidelines.

Don’t miss out on October’s Project Pink

In addition to the blocks being made and mailed to Jennifer, HeartStrings quilters are finishing their own tops and quilts for Project Pink.

Five days into the project and quilt photos are already being posted. Check out our online album for inspiration and then start your own blocks. If you’ll be sending your blocks in for group quilts make sure to read the guidelines.

Sew-In on Saturday, October 20 in Kasson, MN

Sheree is hosting our October sew-in and recently posted this reminder. Please contact her for further details at sheree@kmtel.com.

I’m talking this up locally and plan to bring an extra machine for people who stop in to see what we’re doing. I thought they could sew a strip or two onto a foundation and be part of the process too!

I’m planning on bringing my newly completed blue string quilt (will get a picture) for folks to see. If any attendees have completed tops or quilts that they could bring to show those who aren’t part of our group, that would be great.

Kasson/Mantorville is a small community, so I thought I’d contact our weekly newspaper to see if they’d like to stop over and give us some press as well. I’m pretty psyched about hosting this. I’m excited to see old friends that have been made from previous get togethers as well as hoping that moving the site around will entice other people to join as well … so if you live in Southern Minnesota, Northern Iowa, Twin Cities area, or feel like a road trip would be a great thing to do, PLEASE, join us. It really is a fun and HEART-FILLED day!

We’ll be carpooling from the Twin Cities area – for more information, please contact Sue Frank at suecfrank@aim.com.

HeartStrings Information Sheet

For those of you working with groups or spreading the word about the HeartStrings Quilt Project, we have a new one page information sheet that you can print and distribute. It contains some brief information about the project and the web addresses to our sites.

HeartStrings Information Sheet (PDF file)

Thanks to Kathy for requesting an information sheet and spurring me on to create one! Of the 3 HeartStrings quilts featured, the red HeartStrings quilt was made and donated by Pam and the other two were assembled from group blocks at the MN/WI area sew-in’s and quilted by me.

I added a permanent link on the sidebar so it can easily be found when needed.

Peace by Piece Quilters

Nancy from Peace by Piece Quilters at St Mary’s Episcopal Church in Manchester, CT sent this completed top for our recent Purple Project. She reports that group members are finishing up a Red HeartStrings top and have plans to work on blocks for October’s Project Pink too.

She reports “there is such a ‘buzz’ at church about the Heartstring quilts! I even have a bulletin board set up for our projects and will be posting your website for people to refer to.”

Sneak Preview for October

Since we’ve been having so much fun with our special projects, we’re going to do another just for the month of October. In conjunction with National Breast Cancer Awareness month we’re going to make blocks for quilts that will be assembled and donated to Breast Cancer patients.

There are two options for blocks that will be sent in for group quilts. First option is all Pink and White strings without a designated center string. Second option is a Pink center string with all other colors filling out the remainder of the block.

Guidelines with examples of the above options can be found (and printed) on the website.

Come join us for October’s Project Pink.

We continue to work on assembling quilts from our Chinese Coins and Purple Projects. As always, we accept blocks made according to our standard guidelines at all times. Please email us for the address to send these blocks as it may be different than those sent in for our special projects.

A couple more Purple Project Quilts


Lynn Dykstra emailed me photos of these two quilts today and wrote: “Here are my two projects–the small one went to a baby whose mother and grandmother were very ill during the pregnancy, and the larger one went to our block party raffle for the local food pantry–made $544.00!”

HeartStrings quilts have been donated to individuals and organizations but it’s wonderful seeing one being used as a fund raiser. Thanks for sharing Lynn!