In the past three posts I’ve shown pictures of bereavement quilts for Luke, aged nine. Above is the full-size bed quilt I made for his sister Lisanna, age 7. She chose this striking ribbon pattern from a choice of five patterns. Except for the backing, all the fabric came from her dad’s shirts. 
The challenge of this quilt was to find enough similar fabric to extend each “ribbon”. I was able to find two green and two blue shirts that matched close enough to carry out the ribbon theme. If you look closely you can see that the blue-gray squares are also slightly different – these also came from two different shirts. The taupe four point stars (with orange squares in the middle) were also made from two different shirts. Since I wanted some order to the quilt, I carefully laid all the pieces for this quilt on a design wall before sewing. Putting it together was a bit like doing a puzzle, because of the changing shirt pieces, the block which at first look like a “one size fits all” turned out not to be true.
I found a very feminine slate blue 110-inch fabric for the back which blended well with the front but added some sparkle to the rather somber colors on the front (as did the orange squares).
Note the borders are made from two pairs of trousers, with a third pair filling out the top (I ran out of material so added a matching strip from a third pair of trousers to denote the top of the quilt.
Tomorrow I’ll show the fourth and last quilt I made for the kids – Lisanna’s Windmill Quilt. Again, as seen in the last post, here is Lisanna with her two quilts:
For me, this is the payoff – seeing or hearing about my customers joy in receiving the quilts.