Quilts for the Longest Day
6th June 2024 was the eightieth anniversary of the D-Day landings.
To commemorate this event, we set ourselves the goal of making eighty single bed sized patchwork quilts for donation to veterans. We held an afternoon tea for invited guests on 8th June, and announced that we had exceeded our target, completing one-hundred-and-nine quilts.
Following this, we made the decision to continue with the project. Over the coming months, we are planning to form a not-for-profit organisation, to enable us to run the project on a more formal basis
and apply for funding which isn’t currently open to us. Ben Parkinson MBE has already agreed to act as our patron, which we are very excited about.
The wholesale cost of these quilts is around £50.00 each. At the moment, we do have some fabric left in our stash for quilt tops, but will need to continue to fundraise for wadding and backing. Any donations towards this will be gratefully received, and our Just Giving page can be found here.
We will continue to schedule making days so that volunteers can work on the quilts in our workshop. The dates of these can be found on the workshop tab. If you would like to attend, please get in touch so that we can manage numbers.
If you aren’t local, but would still like to do some sewing, you can send us your completed quilt, or even a quilt top, which we can back and bind for you. The quilts we will be making here will be 135cm by 200cm / 52" x 78", but you are welcome to donate a quilt of any size. All quilts must be cotton, please, so that they will withstand industrial laundry and meet fire regulations. 80:20 wadding is fine, but not polyester wadding, unfortunately. A majority of the veterans are likely to be male, so you may want to keep that in mind when selecting your fabrics.
Alternatively, if you would like to donate some fabric, or make a financial donation towards materials, both would be gratefully received. We will provide updates in our newsletter, which you can sign up for on our home page - and on our dedicated facebook page We will continue to update this page on an ongoing basis, but please do get in touch if you have any queries or comments.