Helping others through art

Quilts for a Cause

Most artists have traditionally made quilts strictly for their own expression, to exhibit, use, or to give as gifts. However, a growing number are creating art for and directing monies to groups that immediately benefit those in need all over the world.

Luana Rubin, co-founder and president of eQuilter.com, began her career in Hong Kong, designing silk textiles and dresses. While there, she took a position with an international company and spent considerable time traveling across Asia for her job. Her experiences there inspired her work as both a designer and a philanthropist.

“When you are exposed to the reality of how some people live in developing countries, it is hard to forget,” she explains. “So I have always felt compelled to share my success with those who are least able to help themselves.”

In 1999, she and her husband, Paul, launched eQuilter.com, an online source for quilting, sewing, and fashion fabric and supplies. They established a program during their first year of business, to commit 2% of all purchases (before taxes and shipping) to various charitable organizations.

“As of November this year, we have reached a personal goal of half a million dollars,” Rubin says. “We raised $85,000 in 2006 alone, and expect to raise that amount or more this year.”

The money raised through the program goes to a number of different organizations including the National Breast Cancer Foundation; Mission of Love (Children’s Fund)—Youngstown, Ohio; Altrusa International (China Orphan Assistance); Rainforest Action Network; Ocean Conservancy; and Doctors Without Borders—all charities that are close to the Rubins’ hearts.

But it is up to the customer to decide which organization will receive the money from their purchase. “I think that just about everyone can find a cause that they agree with on our list of charities,” Rubin says.

Her fundraising isn’t limited to the work she does with eQuilter.com, though. She also donates 10% of her design royalties to charities like Smile Train, which provides free cleft surgery to children in developing countries. When possible, she designs fabric collections that raise money and awareness for causes such as breast cancer research and the ocean conservancy.

And one of her latest charitable ventures took Rubin back to Asia. “When traveling to China in 2006 with McCall’s Quilting Magazine, we raised $4,000 to buy coal for orphanages where kids were losing fingers and toes to frostbite in the winter because they couldn’t afford to heat the buildings,” she explains.

While Rubin and her husband have discovered a way to give back through their business, other quilters have created organizations whose sole purpose is to raise money for charity.

While Rubin and her husband have discovered a way to give back through their business, other quilters have created organizations whose sole purpose is to raise money for charity.

One such organization, Fiberart For A Cause, is an international effort by fiber artists to raise funds for the American Cancer Society. It was begun—somewhat accidentally— in 2005 by artist Virginia Spiegel. Her father is a colon cancer survivor and her sister is chair of the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life in Forest Lake, Minnesota.

Spiegel herself was already a participating team member in the ACS’s Relay for Lif, but wanted a way to increase her donation. So she began making fiber art postcards to sell online, a format that she felt would be both “fun and do-able.”

“My original goal was to have three of the five postcards that I put on my website ‘adopted’ so that I could donate an extra $90 to the ACS,” she explains. “Karen Stiehl Osborn was the first person to ask if she could donate a postcard to the cause and it just grew and grew from there.”

Artists and patrons from around the world, including numerous members of the online group Quiltart, adopted the cause as their own. Enough fiber art postcards were donated and sold online in just four months to raise more than $10,000 for the American Cancer Society.

The FFAC was then invited to exhibit and sell fiber art postcards at the fall 2005 International Quilt Festival and Market. There, the group was able to raise an additional $20,000 for the ACS in just four days. FFAC fiber art postcard exhibits at the 2006 spring and fall Festivals brought in an impressive $18,000 and $58,000 respectively. And Spiegel credits much of FFAC’s success to the assistance of Festival and Market Director and FFAC Honorary Chair, Karey Bresenhan.

“We were provided booth space and publicity at three International Quilt Festivals for the postcard project and the response was unbelievable,” Spiegel says. “My sister and I remember the Festivals as life-changing events—we know how generous people are, how creative, how sharing, and how much good there is in the world.”

The fiber art postcard project has now come to a close, but FFAC continues to raise money for the ACS in a number of other ways. In March 2008, it will hold its fourth Invitational Reverse Auction of Fiberart, featuring a variety of artworks from a select number of artists. Artworks in the auction begin at a fixed minimum donation and are reduced by a certain percentage each day until they are purchased.

Spiegel has also announced plans for a new event, Collage Mania, to be held in spring 2008. Artists may participate by donating a fiber collage to be sold online. FFAC is currently offering the online book Art, Nature, Creativity, Life—a compilation of inspiring essays, poetry, and photographs for artists. Users can access the book, which will be updated often, by making a small donation to the American Cancer Society.

At present, FFAC is the second largest nationwide fundraiser for the ACS Relay for Life contributing a total (including all efforts) of over $135,000 thus far. But Spiegel’s goal is to raise at least half a million dollars.

Quilter, designer, and teacher, Ami Simms, was motivated to begin the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative in 2006, after watching her mother suffer from the disease for over four years. Upon being diagnosed, her mother moved in with Simms and her husband so that they could take care of her. And to relieve some of the pain that she felt at seeing her mother’s health deteriorate, Simms turned to quilting because, as she says, “I’m a quilter—it’s what I do!”

“As the disease progressed and she lost more and more abilities, I became increasingly angry about it,” she says. “Having trouble letting go of this anger, I decided to make a quilt. I would take Mom’s more recent patchwork—with its strange shapes, mismatched seams, holes, and backwards pieces—and I would machine quilt it. I’d use black thread and assault the quilt with the needle, grinding the thread into the quilt.”

The quilting that she would use was to be symbolic of the physical abnormalities that occur in the brain of person suffering from Alzheimer’s. After sharing this idea with her colleagues, Simms was surprised to find that there were many of them whose lives had also been affected by Alzheimer’s.

She began asking if they would be interested in making quilts about the disease for a traveling exhibit and received a great response. Out of this, the 52-quilt exhibit, “Alzheimer’s: Forgetting Piece by Piece,” was born. Since 2006, the quilts have been exhibited in 17 venues across the country as a way to raise awareness.

Simms is also using the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative as a way to raise money for research and education. She began the “Priority: Alzheimer’s Quilts” project, which is named for both the urgent need for research dollars and the fact that the quilts must be small enough to fit into a USPS Priority mailer.

The small quilts (a maximum 9”x 12” size) can be any theme, style, technique, or color and don’t have to directly address Alzheimer’s. Select quilts are auctioned on the AAQI website during the first 10 days of each month. Others are made available at venues like International Quilt Festival, where they are typically offered as donation incentives. Each quilt has its own web page featuring the artist statement, a dedication, and the amount of money that the quilt eventually earns for Alzheimer’s research.

In a little less than two years, AAQI has been able to collect around $150,000 for Alzheimer’s research. More than a third of that amount came from charitable quilters attending International Quilt Festival—almost $17,000 in 2006 and a remarkable $37,000 in 2007.

“The response has been nothing short of fantastic,” Simms says. “Quilters from all over the world are threading their needles to help. When people realize that the small scale is the perfect opportunity to try out a new technique, color combination, or to finish a workshop sample, they really embrace it—even if they don’t know anyone with Alzheimer’s.”

These are just a few of the quilters today using their energy and talent to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes. The tremendous success of all of these organizations serves as proof that quilters, as a whole, are a truly generous group of people. And they are using their creative skills and talents to make a real difference. —Rhianna White

For more information on the artists and organizations mentioned above, visit the following websites:

www.equilter.com
www.virginiaspiegel.com
www.alzquilts.org

# # #