Sulky Supports Quilts of Valor

In honor of National Sewing Month, every week for the month of September I will be highlighting some of the amazing organizations that we support at Sulky of America.

One of the coolest parts of this is that I had so many organizations to choose from! Sulky is such a generous company. I could have chosen from hundreds of organizations that do everything from teach kids to sew, to raising awareness of child abuse, to making clothes for children in Africa. I could tell you about providing thread and stabilizers to guilds across the country for their charity projects or when they provided Sulky 12 wt. Cotton to an after school program that taught girls to do hand embroidery.

It has been a tough job to narrow down to only four charities, but it has renewed my faith in humankind (there are a lot of people doing a lot of great charity work) and has made me appreciate Sulky even more.

The first charity I chose to highlight is The Quilts of Valor Foundation. If you have been quilting for any length of time, you have most likely heard of QOV and possibly made a quilt for them! Their mission is simple. The mission of the Quilts of Valor Foundation is to cover service members and veterans touched by war with comforting and healing Quilts of Valor.

One of the great things about this is you can support them in so many ways.

First, you can make a quilt! Whether you want to make a quilt for a service person that you know personally or if you want to make one and allow QOV to choose the recipient, your quilt will  provide comfort and a healing touch. More importantly it shows the service member that someone cares. The QOV staff tell us that the number one comment they receive from recipients is they didn’t know that anyone even cared. Isn’t that sad? Let’s all show them that someone cares by making a quilt. You can read the quilt guidelines here and get loads of free patterns here.

Second way to support is to volunteer your time and talent as a longarmer. The foundation is always in need of help getting all the lovely quilts they have donated quilted.

Thirdly you can make presentation bags. Every QOV is presented with a bag to store that quilt. Here are a couple tutorials for the presentation bags.

Fourth way to help is to volunteer to speak and fund raise for your local QOV group. Here is a list of the regional coordinators for each state.

Fifth, You can donate money! QOVF is a non-profit organization and is a great organization to consider as part of your giving.

Here are two quilts that Sulky was able to donate to two wonderful service men, Captain Troy Osten and BW Osten. These two were especially important to us since they are the sons of our very own Director of Education, Ellen Osten. The blocks for these quilts were made in one of our Sulky Teacher Certification classes.

Have you made a Quilt of Valor? If so, we would love to hear from you! Tell me about it in the comments below and feel free to post pictures on our Facebook page. Be sure to note what Sulky products you used to make the quilt.

Speaking of that, we have some great products that are perfect for making Quilts of Valor. My personal favorite is Sulky Cotton Blendables America #4105. It comes in both 30 wt and 12 wt.

I also use Sulky PolyLite American Flag #5007. That’s the thread I used to make these placemats (Here is the tutorial). This would be a great thread for using in a long arm machine as well. If you are a long armer who is looking to donate some quilting time, a cone of this thread would be a great buy!  And now a red/white/blue multi-color is also in the 40 wt. Rayon line:  942-2504.

Happy Sewing!