Alongside my work with Flaky Snow Designs, I collaborate with Material Girls.  This is the teaching of patchwork and quilting and allied techniques in the community.  A former colleague and I started Material Girls when we were both semi-retired, having taught in the same local secondary school.  Our classrooms beside each other.  Having both joined the Quilters Guild https://www.quiltersguild.org.uk/, we found our names in the directory (this was pre GDPR) and linked up together.  We have now been teaching together for over six years.  We recently produced a portfolio of our group's work and are amazed at the progress our lovely ladies have made.  They are now designing and making fantastic quilts, textile artwork, work for their own charities such as the Women's Institute https://www.thewi.org.uk/ and creating stunning gifts for others.  

Material Girls also run half day and whole day workshops across Surrey,  

Through mutual friends, we discovered  Project Linus https://projectlinusuk.org.uk/.  Project Linus UK is a volunteer organisation. They aim to provide a sense of security and comfort to sick and traumatised babies, children and teenagers through the provision of new home made patchwork quilts and knitted blankets, and give volunteers across the UK the opportunity to contribute to their local community.  The Material Girls regularly send quilt blocks, quilt tops and completed quilt to the local Project Linus co-ordinator.  We also donate leftover fabric, which I cut into usable squares which can be passed on to other volunteers to use in new quilts.  

Quilt top 1, a hapoy quilt for someone who needs it
Another quilt - this one perhaps for a boy or man

These two quilts were made from fabric donated to me by a friend who also puts her creative flair to good use in creating stitched, knitted or crocheted items for various charities.  

If there are fabric off cuts not big enough to be cut up for Project Linus to use, we collect them all up (they're called "cabbage" which always makes me giggle!) and I bag them up and take to our local Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice https://www.pth.org.uk/ shop in town.  They in turn sell them as "rag" to be used in the manufacture of furniture such as sofas and chairs.  Nothing we use goes to landfill.  We're proud of that and feel we are being true to the origins of patchwork, make do and mend and sustainability.