East Brunswick, NJ Public Library Quilt Project

After Lunney exhibited her quilts in a one woman show in January of 2000 she was commissioned by the Library to organize a community project to make eleven quilts to be made in collaboration with community members; mostly children, and to hang permanently in the Youth Services department.

Support for the project came from the NJ Public Library Tipping Point Grant from the Karma Foundation in North Brunswick and The Friends of The Library.

Interesting facts:
There are 11 quilts
There are 24 , 8” blocks in each quilt.
There are a total of 265 blocks
About 250 people participated from age 4 to 80.
Workshops were held over the course of two years.
It took about 1 ½ hours for participants to make each block, multiplied by 24 blocks equals 36 man hours per quilt to make just the top design.
Lunney stitched down all the elements, often changing thread to many colors within each block. She then assembled the blocks with sashing between into quilt tops and layered it with batting and backs, then machine quilted and bound the edges of each one.
Each quilt was made with approximately 260 yards of thread; there are 300 yards on one spool. This converts to 8,580 ft. of thread for all of the 11 quilts, or approximately 1.62 miles.