People who filed through houses at Homearama in Suffolk last fall weren’t just checking out new trends in outdoor patios or window treatments. They were also helping to encourage others.

At the Get Pink with Sentara Breast Cancer Awareness House, visitors were invited to write a note of encouragement with permanent marker on fabric to women battling the disease. The pieces of fabric then would be stitched together into quilts and given to Sentara to hang in its cancer treatment centers.

Gathering the messages was the easy part. Putting them all together was the hard part.

It took more than 70 volunteers working for an entire week at Nancy’s Calico Patch in Newport News last week, but all of the messages eventually were stitched together, interwoven with rectangles in varying shades of pink.

It was a wonderful community effort to help bring attention to a disease that affects so many women in the community. Over the course of a lifetime, one in eight women will have breast cancer, according to the National Institutes of Health.

In fact, even the owner of Nancy’s Calico Patch, Nancy Gloss, was diagnosed with breast cancer just a few weeks after the Homearama event.

It was a good project for the community to get involved in, from those who wrote the messages at Homearama to those who helped quilt the notes together. Congratulations to everyone involved in the process — you made a difference in the lives of cancer patients in Hampton Roads.