Quilt to be won at International Festival

• Quilt

Brian Korthals/Daily Globe International Festival Chairperson Leann Enninga (from left) with quilt makers Barb Ahlgren and Becky Berning show off the quilt to be raffled for the years festival.

Talk about it

WORTHINGTON — Among the international festival committee, community members and two ladies with quilting experience, the idea of a quilt in a myriad of languages is no longer simply that.

Last year’s International Festival featured a quilt with flags of nationalities represented in the community.

“It was such a big hit (and) we had so many people that really liked that quilt, that we decided to do something again in the form of a quilt,” said Leann Enninga, chairperson for the International Festival committee. “The problem was from getting that idea to this quilt wasn’t an easy route.”

Etched on this year’s quilt is the word “welcome” in 39 languages mirrored by Worthington’s community.

The planning committee faced numerous challenges, beginning with the hunt for quilters who were interested. A friend referred Enninga to Barb Ahlgren.

“And you suggested to me, ‘Don’t you have quilting friends that would like to help with this?’” said Ahlgren with a laugh about how Enninga approached her to recruit another quilter.

Ahlgren thought of her friend, Becky Berning, and together they formed the quilting team.

The next course of action was to get the translations.

“Unfortunately, some of the first ideas about how were going to get translation of all the languages didn’t work quite as well as we thought,” Enninga said. “Sometimes the Internet is not accurate.”

Enninga explained that the goal was to utilize resources in the community. Pooling them together was another challenge.

After sketching the plan, Berning said it was difficult to digitize certain language characters.

“We decided, let’s just have them write it.” Enninga said.

Sure enough, the committee ran into its next problem.

“They were all writing in different sizes, the pen was bleeding through,” Enninga added.

Finally, with the help of a scale and more community members, the problem was solved.

“The idea that so many people contributed to make this quilt is probably about as cool as it gets,” Enninga said.

The quilt will be raffled off Saturday evening.

Raffle tickets for the quilt are being sold at $3 each. Visitors stand a chance to win the quilt among other trinkets on that day.

The 18th Annual International Festival runs Friday and Saturday on the lawn of the Nobles County Government Center.

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