Out of Sight

My brother has a genetic eye disease called choroideremia.  He has worked to live his life to the fullest potential, doing as much as he can and enjoying the gifts God has given him.  He has also been working to raise money for research into curing/treating this eye disease and is in the final stages of the second large fund-raising dinner - Out of Sight.  At this dinner we eat in a dimly lit room, wearing either eye masks or sunglasses to gain some understanding of what it means to be without vision.  Last year I had my eyes opened (pardon the pun) about some of the difficulties of losing vision.  While it was challenging to eat the dinner when blindfolded, that wasn't the toughest part for me.  No, the hardest part was trying to have conversation around the table.  I didn't realize how much I needed my vision to help me focus on the one who was speaking, to understand the flow of the conversation around the table.  I didn't realize how much I needed to see those speaking in order to filter out the noise of the other tables around me.  I managed to keep my blindfold on to eat, but it came off between each course as I couldn't cope with the frustration of the conversation in the dark.  It gave me the slightest understanding of what Mark goes through on a daily basis as his eyesight deteriorates.

So, this year, when he was talking about the second annual Out of Sight dinner and the addition of a silent auction, I offered to give a quilt to him.  He was genuinely touched and that encouraged me even more.  The dinner is a week from today and I managed to get the quilt done on Thursday afternoon so it could get to him in time to organize things.  Phew!  Sometimes deadlines can be great motivators.

Here are some pictures (with the colours not looking as rich as they are in real life).  Hopefully it does more than give him encouragement.  Hopefully somebody likes it enough and gives some money towards the research.

An added joy to this quilt is that I had all of the fabric (except the backing) in my stash and I got to use a pattern that I had bought quite a while ago.