A stitch in time was an initiative I started to help support Hatemja Krasniqi after the untimely death of her husband in February 2015.I'd met Hatemja on a trip to Kosovo to visit my friend Elizabeth Gowing who runs the NGO The Ideas Partnership, focussed on assisting Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian children into school in a deprived community close to the bustling coffee bars of Pristina. Her family w
as supported by the effort of her husband, a lovely man Agron picked rubbish for a living by night in the city centre. Things were looking up for the family, they'd been re-housed as a family in dire need of safe accommodation by the NGO Mercy Corps. Everything looked good. Then last February things rapidly changed. I had a message, Agron was dead. It soon became apparent that the children he had worked so hard to keep in school by his efforts, would soon replace him in his role by night. They had to eat. An idea I'd dimly muted a few months before as a project for the community but done nothing about, suddenly sprung to mind as the answer. I'd teach Hatemja to sew patchwork. What could be simpler? How wrong I was! It was slow start as I little understood what a huge learning curve would present for someone like Hatemja who unlike me never had the advantage of schooling. I naively thought stitching patchwork to use up the excess fabric from my sewing projects would be an easy skill for her to learn. It hasn't been, its been a long hard slog for Hatemja, with many pitfalls. Little things I took for granted, as in the concept of tessellating pattern in patchwork. How do you explain the concept of exactly matching sized squares to someone who has never held a ruler, or cut along a line? I gave her fabric with gulls& little boats bobbing on the sea, the squares returned with the gulls flying upside down in context with the boats. Hatemja had never seen a boat, she couldn't read the fabric. But we've got there. On my last trip to Kosovo we finally sorted all the glitches. The last delivery of patchwork I had from her evidenced a skill I'd been unaware she'd assimilated. I'd always selected the fabrics she should match up. Here were combinations that suprised, but worked! Every penny will go back to Kosovo to keep the children in school. How direct is that? pm me in the first instance if you see one you like!
