Just finished recently – the quilt above was made from some of the clothes below:

Luke’s mother sent me 52 shirts belonging to her husband, with the request that I make Luke and his sister Lisanna each a bed-sized quilt out of the clothes. The shirts for the most part were muted greens, blues, grays and tans. You might note the orange shirt smack in the middle – there were also a few other colorful and bright shirts, but only a few.

I gave each child five choices and this contemporary log cabin design was the one chosen by Luke, who is now 9 years old.  For a large bed quilt, one shirt is often not enough to carry out a repeating design. Note in the closeup above how I used several similar shirts for one strip, which actually worked quite well with this particular design. In a regular log cabin quilt, I could have used a host of similar colored shirts to carry out a certain color, but in this one, a repeated square was called for.

I found this blueish gray mottled Jinny Beyer fabric for the back, shown above with the label on Luke’s quilt.

Although it’s difficult to see, I bordered the quilt with 2-1/2 inch strip cut from off white dockers with an outer 2-1/2 inch strip of various shirt pieces used throughout the quilt. One of the hardest thing for me is to see wasted fabric, which is the norm when making bereavement quilts.

Luke gets his quilts this weekend. This is his big quilt. Tomorrow I’ll post a picture of his smaller “now” quilt.