Our 100 Good Wishes Letter

This is the letter we sent with our Holiday cards to friends and family asking them to help with the project. If you are a blogger friend we would love for you to participate too! Just e-mail me at pieberryblog@gmail.com and I'll give you the address you can mail the fabric swatch and good wish to.

Here's the letter:

"As many of you may already know we are adopting baby girl from China. We have received our pre-approval from China for her adoption, and if all goes as planned, we hope to be able to travel to pick Callie up in the Spring of 2007. She turns 1 on January 27, 2006, and is currently living in the Yangxi County Social Welfare Institute in Guangdong Province. This is in the southern part of China, just west of Hong Kong, and near the South China Sea.

To keep busy during the wait, we have decided to work on a project with which we need your assistance. We would like to invite you to participate in creating a “Bai Jia Bei”, otherwise known as a “100 Good Wishes Quilt”. In parts of China, when a baby is born, family and friends of the child donate fabric pieces to the child's mother. She then makes a quilt for the baby from the fabric. It is said that the luck, energy and good wishes from all of the families and friends who contributed, surround the child when she is wrapped in the quilt. The quilt is then passed down from generation to generation. With your help we would like to honor this tradition from our daughter’s homeland.

Here’s what you need to do to participate:

1. Please choose any fabric that you like.

2. Cut a 8” or 9” square to be used for the quilt.

3. Hand write or type your wish for her on a piece of paper. Decorative paper would be wonderful! Your wish can be anything - your hopes for her, thoughts on the adoption, a poem, prayer, quote, verse, favorite saying, advice or anything meaningful to you. Make sure to sign your name, and the city and state where you live, on the bottom.

The paper with the good wish, and a small swatch cut from your your fabric, will be incorporated into a special “Good Wishes” memory book for our daughter. We will be able to track the fabric in the quilt to the good wish by placing the smaller scrap of fabric in the memory book with the good wish.

If you have more than one person in your family who would like to participate, then please feel free to send more than one quilt block and wish. Remember, we need to get to at least 100 wishes, so the more the better. Children are welcome to contribute to this project!

We know you all have very busy schedules, but we hope you will be able to help us create this special keepsake. This will be incredibly meaningful to us, as well as to her as she gets older, especially since it incorporates a part of her Chinese heritage.

Please keep our baby girl in your prayers that she will stay healthy and safe, and that all will go well with the process, so that we may soon bring her home.

You may follow our journey to our daughter on our blog if you wish.
http://www.pieberry.blogspot.com
Don’t forget to leave us comments!

With warm regards and best wishes for the new year,

Mike and Jill (and Quinn, Caden, Kyan, and Callie)