Memory Quilt

This project is a long time in the making.  In May of 2016, a coworker lost her husband suddenly.  I had occasion to speak to him fairly often, as he was semi-retired and working as a security guard at the courthouse I work at.  From time to time, he would come into our office to visit with his wife, and would always say hello.  I distinctly remember him joking about how he was available to deliver my baby in a pinch, because he ended up delivering their youngest child twenty-something years earlier when the medical staff left his wife unattended in the hospital! 


Well, fast forward several months, and my coworker brought me a bag of her husband's shirts she wanted me to make into a quilt.  I was honored, but terrified--I'd never made a quilt out of shirts before!  So it was with great trepidation that I jumped in and started cutting:

Thankfully, most of the shirts were woven dress shirts that he wore to church.  It still felt wrong taking the scissors to them.  In the end, I found myself with a neat stack of squares.

I had read somewhere that you should back knit fabrics with woven interfacing to reduce warping while piecing and quilting, so I backed the knits with Pellon Shape Flex.  I ended up with seventeen 13.5" x 13.5" squares.  I picked out a neutral beige solid to sash the squares, and started putting them up on the design wall.   I ended up hating how it looked, so I left the squares up on the wall (in the hallway to our bedroom) so I'd be forced to look at it several times a day.  My sweet hubby is the one who suggested cutting the more plain squares into smaller pieces to add interest to the quilt.  Well, duh! 

In the end, this is the layout we decided on.  We settled on this basic layout because I really, really did not want to mess this up.  It's not like yardage, where if you mess up cutting, you can just cut more off of the bolt!  I rapidly sashed all of the pieces and ended up with a not-too-shabby top:

Anyone else love making binding?

I quilted it with a simple cross hatch.  Once again, I was terrified of messing this up, and wanted something foolproof. 

Some more photos:

 

 

 

 

In the interest of privacy, I'm opting not to share photos of the back of the quilt, which was a simple wide back fabric that I personalized.  This was a long and rewarding journey.  I now know that I will probably never make a commissioned T-shirt quilt, though I might end up making a few for my children when they're older. A bittersweet finish.  Until next time, God Bless.