For the past 2 years, our guild has been hosted at the Milpitas Police Department Community Room for our monthly guild meetings and open sew days. Mid-2016, we lost our meeting space at a local quilt shop, and we struggled to find a venue that met our size, location, and schedule requirements, as well as being within our limited budget. So, we were thrilled when we found all of these at the Community Room connected to the Milpitas PD Station. We are very appreciative that the Police Department makes this space available to us and we wanted to show our thanks in a way that expressed our gratitude and spoke to who we are as a group.

We decided to thank the MPD with a quilt banner. After tossing around a few ideas, we settled on an American flag design using patchwork blocks for the stripes and replacing the stars with a single police badge star.

The project was a true group effort. We asked for fabric donations in a Red, White, and Blue palette, which we curated for the quilt blocks. We then asked members to make 3” finished mono-color blocks, signing out blocks to ensure we had enough of each color for the finished top. Blocks ranged from traditional to improv, which we laid out and assembled into a flag at our guild retreat.

The police department initials were machine-appliqued onto the silver star which was then hand-appliqued onto the blue field of the finished quilt top. Quilting and a faced binding finished the banner.

We presented the banner to the Police Chief late last year and were very pleased with how much the officers liked it. We expected to see it hanging on a wall in our meeting room, or in a corner of their offices. We were thrilled to see that the MPD had mounted and framed the banner with a lovely plaque acknowledging our gift. In February, a group of officers allowed us to enter the station and we were truly honored to see that it was hung in their main hallway for all to see.

Our goal was to express our gratitude to the MPD for allowing us to meet in their Community Room, based upon their response we think we got our point across. We look forward to many more years meeting at the Community Room.