My One Big Frugal Christmas Gift: Alzheimer’s Art Quilts

Yesterday I gave my extended family one big Christmas gift. This is our 5th Christmas without my Dada (grandfather), who died from complications of senile dementia in 2002. In his honor, I started working on a project for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative.

The AAQI does a lot of things, including auctioning off mini art quilts to raise money for Alzheimer’s research. So I spent this fall making one quilt for every member of my extended family (not one assigned to each, that was too tough when I tried to figure it out). I still have one left to finish…and once that’s done I’m going to prepare and ship them to the AAQI to be auctioned.

Hopefully this will bring in several hundred dollars (I’m hoping for $500-$700) which will go towards Alzheimer’s research. The quilts range from simple to complex and many have Alzheimer’s/age/memory/life-related themes which I haven’t yet articulated.

Here are most of them, I didn’t have access to a camera for a while to do the rest.

This was very exciting for me, since I love to quilt and I love to see my quilting go to good use (I also make quilts for preemies). It was also frugal, since I used materials I already owned (though it wasn’t time-frugal, but that’s ok). And I think my Dada would be happy. He always encouraged us to develop our talents.

P.S. And since my lovely parents gave me a digital camera for Christmas (hi Mom and Dad!), I’ll be able to take my own pictures now!

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