nanjam62

We have a prayer quilt ministry at our church for cancer patients. We make quilts & put ties in them that are tied in our church atrium between Sunday services. We have been doing this for 5 years & just tied our 300th quilt. Since we meet one evening a month we don't really get much done. It seems like it is time to clean up about the time we get started. I have tried to look on church websites to see how often they meet & for how long but can't seem to get much info. Do any of you belong to church groups or other groups that could offer suggestions on meetings, how often & length?

meemersmom

If your group is organized, perhaps one meeting a month for 2 hours or so could be enough. This all depends on how much the members do on their own time away from the actual meetings. I belong to a similar group (but not affiliated with a church) that gets together about every two months. We bring in completed tops/quilts, and pick up more fabric to make the next one. We then spend the extra time organizing donated fabric, pressing and cutting to make up the "kits" to be picked up at other meetings. I works for us.

kim_s

I am a member of the quilt ministry at my church. We meet every Monday from 9-2. Myself and another girl are co-leaders so we spend a lot of time helping the other members to get quilts completed so we (just the 2 of us) will sometimes meet on another day so we can sew and work on our quilts.

Our day consists of us co-leaders getting there earlier so we can have time to pray together. We usually wait for everyone to arrive to make announcements, etc. Before lunch we break and have prayer time where we tie the quilts that are ready to delivered and then we also pray for our own petitions.

We also have special requests, like we just had a mission team come back from Ethiopia where they handed out a dozen quilts that we completed along with wheel chairs. We also are partnering with a church in Alabama and have made quilts for them to pass out to members who needed prayer. We also make Soldier Prayer Squares for church members who have military family and friends who are being deployed. It's an awesome ministry to be a part of, as you probably already know! That's awesome that you have completed 300 quilts!

God bless you and your ministry,
Kim

nanjam62

We meet once a month 6:30 to 8:30..maybe we are trying to do too much & don't accomplish much. I like your idea about making up kits. We just have a few girls who actually do the piecing (many of our members don't sew) and we could spend the time making kits up for the girls to take home to do the piecing. Thanks for your comments.

nanjam62

We have had our meetings in the evening because so many girls work that like to be a part of it. We are going to discuss our options at our Sept meeting & we may need to have some day meetings to get more done & keep our monthly evening meeting for prayer & making kits like meemersmom suggested. This has been a wonderful experience and all of the girls feel so blessed to be a part of it. It seems the requests come in clusters & when we have so many at one time we really have to hit it to fill all the requests...We filled 22 requests in 6 weeks last winter & they were all in serious condition...having a bit of surplus inventory would be such a relief!! lol

We have had a couple of Saturday events to try to catch up. A couple of years ago we had an all day Saturday Learn to quilt seminar. It was well attended, we had a great time but we didn't get any quilters out of it. I am thinking about asking a couple of quilt shops if they would come to the church & teach a class.

Thanks for your help. I love that you are doing the squares for the soldiers. Wish we had time to start that.

nanjam62

We had some of the teenage girls come to our quilt class & they enjoyed it but of course, aren't interested in coming to our meetings. The soldier squares might be a great project for them. I think I'll mention that to their leaders. Thanks for the idea!!

AliKat

Try looking up Prayers and Squares online. It is a nondenominational quilting society??? Free. They have lots of ideas.

My church has a P&S group and it meets weekly for about 3 hours. A few do sewing, a few do tying, and only 1 or 2 do the cutting. Kits are sometimes made to be taken home and completed. Some of our retired members prefer to do their own quilts at their home and bring them in to have the ties put on.

The quilts hang in our Narthex every Sunday with the name of the intended recipient only. It is up to the recipient or their family to say the "why". Those who attend services are asked to stop and say a Prayer as they tie the Square knots.

Labels are put on each P&S quilt with the name of the recipient, the date, and our church group name.

Hope this helps.
ali

emerald46

We meet once a month for a couple of hours. We sew at home and generally just talk about our projects, where previous quilts have gone and pray over completed quilts. We found it was just counter productive to try doing our quilts at the meetings. No one wanted to commit to more than a 2 hour meeting each month. Sounds like you are doing great.

Dix

Hi, I attend a very large church that has a Womens Ministry. Several bible studies and a scrapbooking classes are offered once a week. And since 2000 we have had a group of 18-22 in God's Handiwork Quilters. We meet every Tuesday 9:30 till noon and usually go to lunch or have covered dish. We meet with the big group for devotional and coffee and donuts and then split into our small groups. The study groups do not meet in the summer, but we go all year round. Each year we make a big quilt for our youth silent auction they have for missions. We love our group and take road trips together. We have laughed together and cried together when a member dies. Of course, we are Methodists so we eat a lot!!!We started with 6 people, so you can do it with as few as you have. Good luck!

Slow2Sew

Our Piecemakers church group also sews at home and we are now meeting only about once every three months, but keep in contact through email, etc. We also discovered that most of our time together was spent setting up and packing away our projects and machines.

We take either our projects or pics to the meetings; however our coordinator collects finished quilts at church and delivers them to the recipients. We have made 100+ quilts for an orphanage in Kenya and lap quilts for nursing homes. A crisis pregnancy center and children in foster care are our current projects.