It's a good thing that projects started don't have an expiration date. This quilt was begun exactly a year ago with leftovers from a quilt I did for Cristina.
Here's the quilt. And here are
the leftovers I started to work with. You can read about the evolution of this quilt in
this June 2018 post. At this point I put it away with backing fabric.
After years of asking my mom to do handwork for me - which she enjoyed and I did not - I have finally discovered what she knew all along: that handwork is purposeful and soothing. My friend Mimi also had an impact on my hand-quilting. She taught me the value of it and shared with me this
YouTube video - it's only 5 minutes - of Renate Hiller demonstrating the importance of Handwork. My class in Sashiko with Maura Ambrose at QuiltCon 2014 gave me the basic tools.
My mom died December 22, 2014 - six months after my dad died. And for those first weeks after her death and memorial service, I quilted. Now every winter, starting right before Christmas, I have to have a project to quilt.
So here it is - December 22, 2018. And I need to quilt. But what? And then I remembered the box with the leftovers from Cristina's quilt. I stitched together some pieces of wool batting and pin-basted this quilt. It's 72" x 72".
![]() |
| The back of the quilt |
|
This holiday was a quiet one, and John does so much of the preparation. And me? I was free to quilt. So I started this on the 22nd. I used two balls of No 8 Perle cotton. It's just been washed. The wool batting gives an extra texture dimension to quilting. This quilt is a big, soft hug to one of my favorite people. There's no one more worthy of a quilt than a quilter, and Cristina began quilting with me when she was a 7th grader. She's 28 now and especially quilt-worthy.
