Amazing! I finished two projects ...

... one started late 2001, and another started in the spring of 2003. I have other projects that need my hand to pick up a needle, but these were my two big ones.

The most recent of the projects, which I finished today, is a quilt I made from scraps I cut from my mother's slacks after she died. I made six quilt tops: three for my brother's children, two for my sister's. and one for Donna. I sent the tops to my sister and my brother's wife at least a year ago, but Donna's has been neatly tucked in my to-do stack since then. Four years after the start date, I'm finished. The quilt is now wrapped in a large plastic bag and placed in Donna's cedar chest.

Each embroideried square represents an event in Mom and Dad's lives together - their marriage, the places they lived, the birth of their children, grandchildren, and those great-grandchildren who were born before Mom died. The quilt is all machine done, including the embroidery on the "history" squares.

The quilt is big enough to lay over you if you're sitting around reading a book or watching TV, or just want a little wrap during a nap. It's a comfort thing, like food.

Family is magic, a way of life for us, our biggest blessing. With family, we love, we fight, we make up, we travel, we handle the struggles and joys of daily living. Family encompasses an entire lifestyle, with everything else falling somewhere in between. This quilt is a representation of the family created by Raymond and Helen.

My other project is that huge bedspread I've been working on, since probably late 2001, which was intended to cover our super-bed - two twins pushed together. It also was my first real experience at paper piecing. I have to confess, I'm not a quilter. With the exception of a quilt I made years ago - a log cabin for a dear friend's first grandchild - two quilts represent the sum of my quilting experience. The real quilters in my family are my daughter, my sister, and my sister-in-law. If I learn enough just to appreciate the work they put into their end-products, I will have accomplished a great deal.

The good news is that the quilt is done and now lays across a bed. But it's the wrong bed. It's too small, by perhaps 12 inches, to fit across our super-bed. And I thought I measured carefully. During my prolonged starts and stops on this quilt, I must have slipped a gear and gotten on the wrong track without realizing it. But for what it's worth, here it is - and I am a new person because this huge project is now out of my to-do stack!




At first, I said to Lauren that I'm not going to do this again. But before the day was over, I started looking through my books for something else I might enjoy learning. I think I've settled on a strip-quilt technique for my next attempt - an attempt I hope manages to create a quilt big enough to cover that bed and hang down the foot and sides to where it covers the top of the dust ruffle. Good luck to me!