News

CCQ donates quilts to Kinship House

Kinship House donationJust in time for the holidays, CCQ members delivered 23 quilts to Kinship House, a Portland nonprofit that provides mental health services to kids in foster care. The Kinship House mission is to help minimize transitions and increase the chances of children settling into a stable, healthy, and permanent home. You can learn more about Kinship House on their website.

In the Coffee Creek Quilters prison quilting program, our students each make three quilts. The first two are for donation to organizations like Kinship House while students get to keep their third quilts.

We know that our quilts are much appreciated and look forward to continuing to provide quilts for donation.

What are our goals?

What are our goals?Instructors in CCQ’s four classes meet regularly to share ideas about teaching in our prison quilting program. We also use email to communicate with each other. A recent email exchange focused on our goals for teaching.

One instructor zeroed in on the technical aspects of quilting:

  • How to find the grain of the fabric
  • The importance of pressing fabric
  • How to accurately cut fabric
  • How to sew a 1/4” seam
  • How to press seams
  • How to connect seams accurately
  • How to measure and sew borders
  • How to sandwich a quilt and baste it
  • How to do simple machine quilting
  • How to apply binding, matching the ends for a smooth finish
  • How to do blind hand stitching on the back side of bindings
  • And how to read and follow a pattern

Another instructor added some non-technical goals:

  • The importance of finishing: sometimes it is just a block, then a row, and then an entire quilt
  • The importance of learning from mistakes and persevering
  • The importance of respecting each other and the instructors
  • The importance of taking the time needed to do a good job
  • The opportunity for creative expression

Meet our members: Liz Weeks

Liz WeeksCCQ member Liz Weeks made the news recently when she was named Featured Quilter at the 2018 Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show.

Liz made her first quilt in the 1970s, then quit to raise her daughter and teach elementary school. She got bitten by the quilting bug again in 1999 and hasn’t stopped since. Liz likes to make traditional quilts best. She particularly enjoys seeing the patterns and colors come together. “I like my quilts to be useful and for people to find warmth in them,” she says.

CCQ was founded in 2002. Liz lived in Tigard at the time and became one of our first instructors after reading an article about it in The Oregonian. Teaching women incarcerated at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility was deeply satisfying to Liz. One of her students told her, “The only time I don’t think about where I am is when I’m here.”

When she moved to Bend in 2005, Liz became the Central Oregon Representative for Coffee Creek Quilters; she helps coordinate donations and publicity locally for us. Her other volunteer activities include the Quilts for Kids project, Kiwanis Food Project, and the Sisters Quilt Show.

You can learn more about Liz in the NuggetNews.com article “Featured artist finds comfort in quilts“.

Thank you Liz for your past, present and future support of CCQ.