The material was difficult to work with, the hours were long and the finished product will be sold during an Internet auction in October to benefit a far-off charity.

Still, Mary Ann Hiser and the rest of the women involved in the project to make a quilt out of Indian saris consider their time and effort well spent.

Their quilt will be blessed at the 9:25 a.m. service Sunday at Christ Community United Methodist Church, 205 N. Duffy Road.

“We're going to have the pastor (the Rev. Jeff St. Clair) bless it before we mail it off. Show everybody what we've been doing, so they can see,” Hiser said.

What Hiser of Prospect, a member of Christ Community, and her friends and the church's quilting group have been doing is making a quilt whose sales will benefit Sari Bari, a Calcutta-based group that employs women to create products such as pillows, bags and throws from used saris, a strip of cloth 4 to 9 yards in length that is draped over a woman's body, in order to give them an alternative to working as prostitutes.

Hiser got interested in Sari Bari because her son, Kenny Hiser, is living in Calcutta and has been involved in Sari Bari.

Kenny Hiser, a Slippery Rock High School and 2008 Penn State graduate, has been living in Calcutta since July 2010 working with a group called Servants to Asia's Urban Poor, a community service group working on developing projects in Asia's teeming slums.

“He actually lives in a slum. He seems to be thriving. I went to visit him in June,” said Hiser. “We got to go to Sari Bari and meet the women that run that and some of the women doing the sewing for them.

“India is fascinating. It is extremely crowded, wonderful and the people are very poor. They are living in the street, destitute people,” she said.

“It's rich, colorful and vibrant, but it's also struggling at least in the city we were in,” Hiser said. “The infrastructure is not there.”

When Hiser learned Sari Bari was seeking quilters and quilting circles for its quilt auction to raise funds to buy property in the Kalighat red light district, she signed up to take on the project.

“I just recruited some people that I know could sew,” said Hiser. She got the quilting group involved as the project moved on.

The saris, 15 of them, arrived in early April, Hiser said.

“They were a lot bigger than I thought they would be,” Hiser said.

“They were 20 inches wide by 3 yards long,” said Martha Mine of West Sunbury, one of Hiser's friends who worked on the quilt.

Grace Younkins of Butler said the material was hard to work with.

“It was like gauze. It was very thin. They had to get a backing, a nylon backing on it before they could cut it out.

“It was a decision to pick the biggest pattern that was easy for multiple people to work on,” Hiser said.

Hiser and her friends worked on converting the saris into quilt pieces.

“Parts we worked on individually. A few days we all got together at my house and sort of did an assembly line,” said Hiser.

Janet Black of Renfrew said, “I am not a member of Christ Community. I know Mary Ann from another group we belong to. I worked on sewing the pieces together.”

They were put together in a railroad crossing pattern, said Mine.

“This was one (pattern) quilters used during the Civil War that was used as a signal by the Underground Railroad,” Mine said. She said using the pattern on the sari quilt seemed fitting because “this is to free women from their slavery.”

“Once we had it pieced, that's when the quilting group stepped in to help us,” said Hiser, adding the piece process was done by early May.

Stretching the top piece on a frame, the quilters worked on sewing a layer of batting between the top piece and a layer of backing.

Carolyn Glendening of Butler, a member of the quilting group, said, “We get together once a week. We were coming more often for that. I'd say it took about a month.”

Janet DeLair of Butler, another quilter, said, “She (Hiser) went over to India and we were trying to get it done before she got back (on June 26.)”

Asked how many hours the women put into the project, Hiser admitted, “I was going to keep track but I lost track.”

She estimates she personally put about 50 hours into the quilt and guessed the total number of hours put in by everyone would be in the “hundreds of hours of work.”

Mine took the leftover sari material and made at least 40 change purses out of it, which the women hope to sell after the blessing service Sunday at Christ Community.

Hiser said the quilt will be mailed to a photographer in the United States, who will photograph it along with the other quilts being made from saris.

All the photographs will be displayed at the Sari Bari website (saribari.com) in preparation for the online auction Oct. 10.

“I will be sorry to mail it off. I'm thinking about bidding on it. I have no idea what will happen with the bids, but I may bid on it,” said Hiser.