Alzheimer Raffle Quilt from Auckland

Dear Rosemary


Here is our finished quilt! It looks absolutely stunning, and a real community effort.

The Auckland Patchworkers and Quilters Guild makes a quilt every year to be raffled with the proceeds to go to a chosen charity; selling of the tickets culminates at our annual "Calico Christmas" quilt show in the first week in November where the quilt is always featured as part of the display.

This year we decided on blue and white, with our chosen charity as Alzheimers Auckland, whose logo of course is "Forget-me-not" with those colours, so our choice of quilt is perfect! .. Like other places around the world, New Zealand has an ageing population and there are over 40,000 people with dementia of some kind in the country, more than 10,000 of them in Auckland, our largest city.

Seventeen different people hand-appliquéd the 20 blocks, two others assembled the quilt; it was professionally machine quilted by another of our members and the binding done by yet another. These lovely people come from "all over" so its not been possible to assemble them all for a photo-shoot I'm afraid. We have just started selling the 2500 tickets, and I'm very hopeful we will sell all of them, particularly as Alzheimers Auckland is holding a big Quiz Night fundraiser in September and will be promoting ticket sales there too.

Thank you again for allowing us to use your designs. They are perfect for our purpose - so stylish and very up to date, but also so traditional - we know from previous raffle-ticket-selling experience that "traditional" is good! And I think all our hand-workers enjoyed their stitching. I know I have enjoyed organising it and am very proud of our result!

Yours sincerely

Elizabeth Sadler

Raffle Organiser,

Auckland Patchworkers and Quilters Guild Inc.