My Memories of Making Five Memory Quilts

I finished all five memory quilts, made from my sister's clothes. Her kids had divided them into five color and memory-coded groupings. The fabrics were everything from a white faux fur vest that each of the kids wanted used in their quilt, to good quilting cottons, to knits, to open-weave sweaters and jeans.

I worked on these quilts over many different states. Connecticut and Maryland are where I did all the cutting of my sister's clothes. North Carolina is were I started sewing the first quilt, learning how to do a traditional quilt. I  hand stitched as we drove from North Carolina to Kansas City and later north to South Dakota, then back through Kansas City to Memphis, then back north to Maryland. I sewed later in Maryland and Virginia, sitting on patios, beaches, alongside swimming pools, and on front porch steps, as well as in our RV. Those quilts went a lot of places with me. Mostly they stayed next to my heart.

I came to love those quilts. I wasn't sure how to do them when I started. I had just learned to do rag quilts with my daughter-in-law last December and thought I could do them all like that. Than a friend, a master quilter, taught me how to quilt the traditional way. So the quilts are a mix of the two styles.

Each quilt spoke to me. I spoke to my sister as I worked with her clothes. Though I loved those quilts,  I hated them too. They represented my sister's death. But we couldn't control that. We can't reverse that.  What I could control was to make something that would have a kinesthetic connection to my sister and to represent something beautiful - the memories and the immortality of love. I know particular articles of her clothing were tied to her kid's activities, interests, events. I also saw articles of her clothing that were tied to visits to me over the years, such as a couple of  crab T-shirts from Maryland. Many articles of clothing I worked with she had purchased when I'd taken her shopping to get clothes that fit her better as she lost weight. And there were even a couple of blouses I'd given her.

This the first quilt I finished, done in 4 inch squares, rag quilt style. The colors, kind of hard to tell from this picture, seemed to me to be predominantly pinks and browns, so I used a plain, brown cotton/felt/fleece-type material as the backing. It is the only one of the quilts that has a totally plain back, just squares with "X" sewed across each. It is warm and cozy.

  Here is a closer look.

And closer. 

This next quilt, obviously in a red theme, but with grays, blacks, and some blues, is also done in the rag quilt style, but with 6 inch squares because the 4 inch squares took forever and a day to cut, and they limited what could be seen of some of the logos and words. This time, I put my sister's clothes on to the "back" of the quilt. I mean, really, the front of the back is what we call it, right? I was learning as I was going and it occurred to me that the different logos would show up better if not folded over and clipped like the previous quilt.

 Here is a closeup.

Here is what normally would be the front on a rag quilt but is now the back, made from alternating thick gray fleece and a winter-weight gray cotton printed sheet. I love how the red from the opposite side shows up in the frayed seams.

And a closer look at the what normally would be the front of a rag quilt but is now the back on this one.

 

 And closer.

Here is a quilt in the traditional style, where my friend, the master quilter, helped me design and sew these front pieces together, helped me put the batting in the center, and line a backing on it, with black edge trim. Then she showed me how to "stitch in-the-ditch" - in the seams, by hand, with a quilting needle. She suggested I use buttons if I like, decoratively and to do double duty to help hold the layers together. She also suggested I stitch around words or designs and have fun with it. She told me to just let the quilt talk to me and tell me what it wants to do. I did that. And it did.

The color scheme is very eclectic but with lots or oranges, yellows and reds.

 You can see I stitched around the light layers of the lavender star behind the word, HOPE. I'd also stitched through each of the letters of the word HOPE.

And here, below, I used buttons that had lined the opening edges of a cardigan made of material too loose to try to use in the quilt. I stitched them around the border on what had been a black T-shirt, now surrounding a green Golf polo shirt logo. The buttons helped hold the fabric layers in place. Initially I'd done hand stitched square rectangles around the green rectangle on the black, but I didn't like how that looked so I took it all out, and just like my friend said, the idea came to me that those large, square and rectangular, shiny black buttons were supposed to be here.  

Here is the back, a bit puckered in places.  My first.

Here is another quilt, done in a rag quilt style, but with 12x6 rectangles, backed in denim with alternating shades.  As you can see, the color scheme here was primarily blues.

 Here is the back.

And here is the last one, done in the traditional method, with batting and backing and stitching in the ditch. I put T-shirt designs and a sweatshirt logo on the back of the quilt so that the front would all be in the wonderful color scheme of greens.

 Here is the back with the T-shirt designs and sweatshirt logo's.

Here is a closeup of the front.

Closeup of one of the T-shirt designs on the back.

I love these quilts. We mailed them off, UPS, last Tuesday. As of Wednesday, they've all arrived to my sister's children.

There were tears, I'm sure. As there were when I was making them.