Saturday, June 6, 2009

What I Am Working On!

This week apart from preparations for the univ. graduation celebration of youngest DS last night [more on that in a later blog] I have been working at readying another eleven HOB quilts for bereaved CO. military families located recently.

I had two quilts still unbound, here's the last one that I finished- the front.......


and back. It's quilted with freehand meandering feathers.

A stack of another ten I had completed earlier - they have all been awaiting identification of NOK, the toughest part of the mission. It can take years to locate the families - just this week I found family of a fallen hero from 2004.
There have been terrific offers of help in plenty for the construction of blocks & tops, but many of the quilts still require quilting & binding & I have a collection on hand in that stage of construction. It is the actual hands on with the quilt construction for these brave families that I do best & really love.
So I will need to get busy this summer finishing up more of them.
HOB State Coordinators are responsible for finding the survivors, contacting them, then final preparation & delivery of the quilts with all the attendant documentation, labels for sewing on the backs of the quilts,

certificates that go with them...........
and a sympathy card. A copy of the certs. goes to the National Coordinator for recording there.
Each coordinator has the freedom to design their own state's documents so you will probably not see any two states with the identical papers. I had a lot of help with the pictorial part of these from friend Loretta, AZ State Coordinator, who has Desktop Pub. on her PC that allows a lot more creative freedom than Word.
Because I am not a natural on the computer [& I dislike what I consider to be the tedium of paperwork] I find the doc. prep is a real headache especially when I have so many to process at one time, I get very confused about names & dates & how many of each I need/have made & so on. I procrastinate as long as I can & feel so righteous when it's done!
When I switched to Mac I got Word for Mac 2008 & all my docs were an older Word version so for some reason the docs transferred in an altered state e.g. format all wrong, two pages instead of one etc.
Although I have tried to re-align the above mentioned docs. in Word 2008 on my Mac, most likely due to operator ignorance I have not been able to do so making it necessary for me to email them across three feet of office space to DH's Toshiba, reformat & print from there!
A really computer literate person will most likely know what's up & suspect that I am a computer retard!
It is my fervent hope that tomorrow I will be able to complete this process & have these quilts ready to go to the recipient families who are waiting for them then I can feel OK about returning to other quilty stuff!
Such as, the project below, one that I have worked on a very little this week when I simply had to take a break from paperwork.

It's called "Future's So bright",

this is the pile of blocks awaiting pressing. Monday is my goal for making more progress on this quilt.

What would be less than a day's work for others on the computer turns into several days, in this case all week for me.
And that is what I have been working on this week!

3 comments:

Keetha Broyles said...

Those quilts are gorgeous, and you've made SO MANY!!!

farmlady said...

This is an amazing effort Ros. I can't begin to tell you how what you do for these families touches my heart. It is truly a project built from grief and love..., with a huge amount of talented effort. .

Dena said...

I am in awe of your dedication towards this effort. You have literally shared your heart with all of those families.