Mongolia 2007
In March, Selenge came to visit me here in US and we began our fundraising campaign to raise $80,000 to purchase a permanent community center in Ulaanbaatar. We hosted a special exhibit of Mongolian quilts and sold patchwork items made by the Mongolian women at the Quilter's Anonymous show in Monroe, WA, and at a show in Milwaukie, near Portland, OR. Selenge had the opportunity to meet many quilters in this area and browse some of our quilt stores.
We met again in August in UK, Selenge's first visit to Europe. Together with UK quilters Lesley Coles and Jane Grendon, we hosted a Mongolia booth at the Festival of Quilts, a huge quilt show held in Birmingham with over 25,000 attendants. Connie Gilham, former International Representative of the UK Quilter's Guild, who initiated the Mongolia project there, joined us. The photo shows all five of us in the Mongolia booth. The Mongolian women are becoming more and more creative with their work, making pictorial appliqué quilts and beautiful silk pieces in complex patterns. The progress in their work, since beginning from scratch three years ago, is astounding and delighted us. Our booth attracted much interest and we raised over $7,000 from the sale of quilts and patchwork items. This was sufficient to pay for another year of rent at the Quilting Center, and to help with several months of operating and maintenance costs. We aimed to complete our capital campaign to purchase a building before September 2008, when this batch of rent will run out.
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