After a long hiatus from blogging, I hope to catch up and resume with a fairly regular schedule . I have done many quilts since I last posted.
The quilt below is a twin bed size. I started it using stash fabrics, most of which I bought in thrift stores. When I was sitting outside our fifth wheel trailer under the awning, hand quilting this quilt, a lady quilter came over to our campsite to chat me up. She wanted to know where I source my fabrics. This quilt was all flannel pieces. I proudly informed her that I purchased nearly all of it from thrift stores, estate sales, or repurposed it from old clothes (like most original quilters did). Her face changed to thinly veiled disgust. I guess it's not for everyone. I have become a fan of Cas Holmes who recycles or upcycles (whatever word you prefer) into fiber art. She has gypsy roots. I really relate to Bohemian lifestyle, traveling (wandering) and living small, reusing things, being content. When I read about Cas and viewed her work I loved it. I keep finding more and more of us out here and there in the world who work with found or existing items and fabrics.
The quilt below was made for my dad who had had a major stroke and ended up in a nursing home. He was a tall gentleman, 6'3" and over 200 pounds and also had initial signs dementia so home care was not going to be an easy option and my mother who was relatively healthy at the time opted for nursing home care. She and my dad had nursing home insurance that was so good that its not offered anymore as an insurance choice.
Dad was hurt and very angry, fit to be tied, to be put in a nursing home. He was hard to be around. It seemed even as if he was being tortured, so great was his distress. He had been a successful farmer and was locally involved in government and education for most of his adult life. He had put seven kids through school or saw them launched in houses and careers. It has a sad way to wind up what was an almost 92 year life, with the last couple in a nursing home. I had trouble seeing him and I know it was a cop out not to spend more time with him at this stage of his life. He was in a nursing home that one of my sisters worked in as well as a sister-in-law so I knew he was as well cared for as possible outside of being in his own home.
I loved him so much and thought of him though I was not there often. We were traveling in our fifth wheel a lot and did not stay in Iowa full time to visit him as I'd done a couple years before with my sister who was dying of cancer. Maybe because of the toll it took on me being the primary care giver to my sister during the day for almost a year, that I couldn't be around my dad all that much in his last years.
So I felt a strong urge to do something for him. Something that was within my capability and that took a lot of thought and a lot of my attention. I made this quilt to go on his bed, to cover his body and provide him warmth and love, whether he was aware of it or not, and I don't think he was aware of that fact by the time I was finished with it. After he died, I gave it to one of my sisters. At the viewing for his funeral, she had it covering a table holding photographs.
I look at the pictures of this quilt and remember laying it out on a bedroom floor in a friend's house in Maryland. I remember planning it, piecing it, layering the finished topper and the sandwiched batting to the backing, all of it carefully taped with painters tape to the clean, wooden floor and carefully crawling around on top of it to baste the layers together. This took several days. I remember getting a couple calls from a niece reporting on my dad's condition as I was carefully moving over the top of this quilt with a curved needle and long stretches of thread.
So this quilt was stitched with love, carefully planned, neatly done. It is one of my favorites and I'm really proud of my work.
