Stringing Along for Charity with Humble Quilts!

Lori of the Humble Quilts blog has opened up another Stringalong link up this week.  Along with a project I've been working on for a while, I also made some new blocks this weekend.  Recently, I was checking out Myra's "Finished or Not Fridays" linkup and saw a post by Kat over at Kat and Cat Quilts about her "Covered In Love" charity quilt drive.  

Kat puts out calls for block donations or collects UFO tops to be sent to her to be made into finished quilts to give comfort to terminally ill patients in hospices in east Texas.  Turns out for January and February she was calling for string blocks!  So once again, someone is making strings the thing this year!  I donated string blocks to a different cause a while back (a good while as it turns out -- it was in 2012), so it was nice to participate in something like this again.

Kat decided to do a string variation block this round:  she is asking for 12-1/2" blocks to be made with a red corner (between 1-1/2 inches and 3 inches) and the strings added around it half log cabin style.  Easy enough!  After checking with her to make sure there was still time to make a submission,  I pulled a square from my Scrap Users box and cut up a charm square to get a few more.  However, then I found some really short red pieces among the string stash and decided to cut them down to squares and added those to the scrap square and one of the charm square subcuts so I had a variety of centers.  Up to now, I've only had the chance to work with neutral strings for my "Roll, Roll, Cotton Boll" project so this was an opportunity to pull out some of the colored strings.

Mind you, this is only a small sampling taken from the larger bag I have!  I've managed to make up four blocks although I realize that going forward I need to stash more of the wider strings.

After I started making the donation blocks, I figured I might as well also make a few more blocks for "Cotton Boll" right along with them:

I'm going to send the four variation blocks and make a cash donation to the cause as well.  That is because the decision to make the blocks jogged my memory of something: back in 2016, my DH's aunt (one of my MIL's sisters) went to the hospital and was diagnosed as terminally ill.  When we went to visit her, the first thing DH said to me when we got back home was, "do you have a nice bright quilt we can take to her to use in her room?   It looks so cold and sterile there".  We ultimately took my "Fabric Gal" quilt for her to use while in the hospital and when she was later transferred to a hospice.

I can honestly say it made everyone happy: his aunt, the hospice staff, visiting family and her daughter right up until the day her mother passed.  After that I added to the label already on the quilt and inscribed it to both the late aunt and her daughter and gifted it to her.  So I know from personal experience this kind of gift can bring comfort and joy at a difficult time.

I hadn't known when I made that quilt that this would be its ultimate purpose but we quilters always like when we know a quilt will be enjoyed by whoever receives it.  So I look forward to seeing the quilts my blocks go into and knowing that they will brighten someone's hospice stay and continue to comfort their family afterward.  I also look forward to seeing what blocks Kat calls for the rest of the year and hope to be able to donate again!

7/12/19 Edited To Add:
Here's some updates on all the wonderful String blocks Kat recieved and the quilts that resulted from them for donation:

Round 1:  http://katandcatquilts.blogspot.com/2019/06/string-drive-2019-round-1.html

Round 2:  http://katandcatquilts.blogspot.com/2019/07/string-drive-2019-round-2.html

Quilters are a caring bunch!