Dee’s Quilts are Out of This World!!

Quilter’s Name: Dee Goerge from Minnesota

Style of Quilt: Bed Quilt

Name of Quilts: Earth & Sky and Earth Gems

Featured Date: 03-02-23

Hi, I’m Dee. When Missouri Star Quilt Company offered a Daily Deal for fat quarters of Earth Views fabric in 2022, it didn’t take long for me to place an order. The designer, NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, grew up about 20 minutes from where I live in central Minnesota, and the fabric is beautiful — based on photos she took from space.

Less than a year later, Earth & Sky and Earth Gems quilts include Earth Views fabric and are part of a quilt raffle (May 7, 2023) to raise money for Action For Children – Zambia (AFCZ). It’s one of the organizations our quilting group, Mary’s ACC Quilters, makes quilts for.

Our group includes women from eight Catholic Churches who are part of an Area Catholic Community (plus friends and family). We make quilts for five organizations including Hospice, a nursing home, a reservation school, a veterans home and AFCZ.

Women in my church started making quilts for AFCZ several years ago because a family in our parish was close friends with the founder, Carol McBrady, a former Minnesota social worker. Kids she rescues from the streets of Lusaka, Zambia, are given a quilt, which they treasure, Carol says. We make the quilts with used cotton sheet backs and flannel sheet batting, suitable for Africa’s climate.

As she celebrates 20 years, we want to raise money for AFCZ’s many expenses including tuition and building projects. The raffle quilts are special because of our local tie to Karen Nyberg, who also signed labels to put on them. The queen-sized Earth & Sky quilt was longarm quilted with “Saturn Swirls” by Mary & Mike Eidem, owners of Do It Yourself Long Arm Quilting, Battle Lake, Minnesota. I machine quilted the twin-size quilt, Earth Gems, with a serpentine stitch.

We love the A to Z ties. America to Zambia. Astronaut to Zambia.

Karen summed up that connection and why we love to quilt for others when she was interviewed for a newspaper article.

“One of the reasons I wanted to create Earth Views was to bring attention to how beautiful this world is,” she said. “We need to go past our little worlds and look at earth as a whole in decisions we make and empathy for people on the other side of the world. The earth is interconnected.”

(To learn more about or contribute to AFCZ, go to www.afczambia.org)

Thanks!

Dee

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