Sew to Serve: COVID-19 HOPE Quilt

Quilts have long been a way to give comfort in trying times. When created to honor loved ones, they can provide hope, healing, and unity. The COVID-19 HOPE Quilt project has just those goals in mind.

We began the COVID-19 HOPE Quilt project to help communities express gratitude toward and honor their unsung heroes. Heroes include frontline workers, who have faced extraordinary challenges during COVID-19, and countless others affected by or lost to the pandemic. The response has been tremendous: children as young as 5 through adults aged 95 have contributed, across America and beyond.

Our growing HOPE Quilt collection captures on fabric all the inspiring stories we’ve received. To share those stories and beautiful artwork, we have gathered the HOPE quilts into a traveling quilt collection.  To date, we’ve displayed the quilts with Letters of HOPE at the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, and nearby quilt exhibitions.  In 2022 and 2023, we have many more events planned, including Mancuso quilt shows and the International Quilt Festival in Houston. You can find upcoming events here.

Please join us! As part of our Sew to Serve series, BERNINA is encouraging our sewing community to create a COVID-19 HOPE quilt and donate it to the project. We’ll consider your finished quilt for inclusion in our traveling quilt events. You or your quilting group could have panel blocks or quilts in progress that make excellent contributions. Individual panel blocks can be as simple as permanent markers on fabric. Entire quilts could showcase the most sophisticated sewing, embroidery, textile art and quilting techniques.

For instructions on how to create and donate a quilt, please go to the COVID-19 HOPE Quilt website. Once your quilts are finished, please share a picture on the WeAllSew Community section.

This quilt is an example of panel blocks made by young children, quilt instructors and professional painters.

How to Join Us in Our Mission to Sew to Serve Others

• Share your volunteer sewing efforts through your social media, making sure to tag BERNINA USA on Facebook and Instagram along with the hashtag #weallsewtoserve.

• Share your Sew to Serve story on the WeAllSew Community section by uploading a few pictures to the “Sew to Serve” section in the dropdown menu, and add your story about how you volunteer your sewing talents to help those in need.

Please add a comment to this post and share with us any organizations you would love for us to feature as a Sew to Serve highlight!