Memorial Quilt

A few weeks ago, I met a customer who wanted to have a quilt made from clothes worn by her partner who had passed recently. These kind of projects always make my eyeballs sweat a little – I never know what I’m getting myself into when working with used clothes. Plus, this one was emotionally charged. BUT, I was interested in doing something I haven’t done before and after meeting the customer, I knew she would be great to work with and maybe the quilt would help her get through this period in her life with a smile.

So, she gave me a box of clothes and we found a pattern she liked. The pattern is from Laurie Shifrin – it’s called Crosswalk and it’s for a table runner and placemats. So right off, I know there is going to be some “design as I go” in this quilt. I went to The Quilting Loft and talked with Laurie about how to convert this pattern into a lap-sized quilt and her recommendation was to create three panels and sew them together.

Original Pattern

The 3-panel mock up

The customer asked if the original design could be done in a lap size – instead of 3 panels, just one panel but broken up with the three slices. So that’s what we are going to do.

The box of clothes had T-Shirts, ties, running gear and a kimono. All very subtle colors so even though there isn’t a color theme, they are all going to look very nice together. The biggest challenge is there isn’t enough of most of the fabrics to create a row the size of a lap quilt. So we decided that the rows could have a couple different fabrics in them – as long as the colors in the row were coordinated. It will create a little extra interest (or chaos if you want to look at it that way), but every row will be something that looks good together. The solid borders on both sides of the slices are going to be from dress slacks – beautiful olive and black material.

Here are some pictures of the original garments and the resulting rows:

And here is where we are now… all the garments have been made into rows.

The next step is to meet with the customer so she can help put the rows in the order they will be in the quilt. There turned out to be more material than we expected so this could be a larger quilt if she wants. We have already talked about putting a border on this quilt – to help tie everything together and make it look finishes/framed. The border will be a great place to put the patches her partner has from working for the forest service (rather than trying to figure out how to make them part of the pieced quilt).

More pictures to come, I’m sure.