Welcome Blanket

Last spring, I heard about the Welcome Blanket project calling for quilts, afghans, and other blanket-like items to be given to refugees resettling in Vermont.  My local quilt shop, A Quilters Garden, was one drop off place for the project.  Each item submitted needed to be about 40” square and accompanied by a message of welcome for its new owner.  Having emigrated to this country as child, I believe I share a special bond with people settling in the US from afar.  I had to participate.

 What do you know?  I still had a bunch of yoyo blocks left over from the GMQG giant yoyo quilt project of 2018-19.  They’d be great in a scrappy quilt.  Even the back, batting, and binding of my little quilt were made of scraps.  But it didn’t use nearly enough yoyos; in fact, I still have a few just waiting to be included in future projects.

 Some 60 Welcome Blankets and accompanying welcome messages were on exhibit at Heritage Winooski Mill Museum earlier this year before they were given to refugees in the community.  On February 12, the Mill Museum held a special workshop on making and using yoyos which gave me quite a chuckle.

 Welcome Blanket is a nation-wide project created in 2017 by Jayna Zweiman, co-creator and co-founder of the Pussyhat Project.  Zweiman believed that Welcome Blanket could be a tangible way to engage the community in welcoming our newest Refugee population to America.  She expects to make it an ongoing project, and to date around 6,500 have been distributed nationwide.  You can learn more about the project at http://www.welcomeblanket.org and

https://www.themillmuseum.org/welcomeblanketvt.  When watching the video on the museum’s site, keep an eye out for my quilt.