A Quilter's Legacy

A couple months ago, a quilter friend of mine passed away after a long and fulfilling life. Find out more about Janet here:  A Tribute

Janet made lots of quilts for donation to various organizations, like the hospital NICU, Veteran's home, and others. Her daughter found a large stack of these in progress. Janet had a goal to make 50 of these but did not complete her task.

The Sunday Sew and Sews agreed to finish this project in her honor. Recently, Janet's daughter brought four carloads of stuff to my house for this reason. It has taken some time to organize all the quilts to get them ready for the Sunday Sew and Sews to pick up but they are ready:

Janet was very organized. She had a notebook with four typewritten pages of all the donation quilt tops she had made. That was enormously helpful to me as I found each top, selected a back, batting and binding for each and got it ready for someone to complete:

 The binder also held many patterns Janet had collected over many years for donation quilts--from magazine pages to those printed off the Internet, all neatly stored in the binder.

Just one page of four

The sizes she used the most for various purposes

It took the better part of 2 days to get all the quilt tops ready. There were at least 50 bins of fabric to go through for backings and bindings and bags of batting to cut. I found good selections for each quilt, including the 3 that needed borders added or backing pieced together.

Dining Room Command Central

Garage Staging Area

Janet had two favorite designs she liked for the quilts she made for children. One pattern she designed in 2004, she called the Sawtooth Star Quilt. Janet loved Seminole Piecing and often added it to these quilts as well as her own:

With Seminole pieced border

Very simple border

The one she called "My Favorite Donation Quilt: is very simple--she let the fabric do the talking:

Super Simple

Seminole Pieced borders

Some little boy will love this

Both of these patterns finish at less than 45" wide so one length of fabric makes the back. It take 1.25 yards for the back and just over 1/3 yard for binding.

When people say "I don't have time to make donation quilts" I will think of these and how easy they are to put together. 

Once in a while she made a more time-consuming quilt to donate:

Floating Stars--she probably got these in a swap

Two of the Sunday Sew and Sews volunteered to quilt a bunch of them on their longarms. Robin took 16 and Holly took 10. All I had to do was be sure I gave them all the yardage needed for big backs and batting and binding for all those quilts.  There was a full roll of Warm and White batting and many bags of 3 yards of 90" wide batting, so plenty on hand for the longarmers and plenty to cut into pieces for the remaining 20+ quilts to be done on domestic machines.

When the 26 being quilted by Robin and Holly are done, they will pass them on, along with the binding I included for each quilt, to another Sunday Sew and Sew for final completion.

Now the Fun Part: Once I had all the quilts prepared, I could look through the bins to see what I might want. Oh, yes, we each get 3 bins for our own personal use. There are thousands of yards of fabric here:

As I am making Quilts of Valor at the moment, I was thrilled to find yardage of reds and blues I can use for borders and backs--thanks, Janet! She tended to buy everything--all colors--all styles, fat quarters and 3 yard pieces. The women will have fun this weekend picking out their 3 bins to take home.

One simple rule: no cherry-picking, you take the whole box. Fortunately, Janet had things pretty much in organized groups in the bins. There is sure to be something here to make everyone happy. Three people have already come to get quilts to work on--they were surprised to see all these boxes to choose from.

There are also lots of books--some she even had two copies of. Sadly, today most quilters don't want books, they want to find everything for free on the Internet or YouTube. There are some real gems here, some from 25 years ago, some very recent. I hope they find a new home. If you are looking for a specific book from the past, let me know, it might be here  and I'm  happy to share:

Last Summer, Janet did a giveaway of TONS of fabric and she told us there was still plenty left. Read about that here: Do I NEED More Fabric?  She was right...

I thought I have a lot of fabric, now, really I don't feel so bad. While I often say "I have a sinful amount of fabric"  what I really mean is "I am the curator of an extensive personal textile collection".

Janet would be pleased to know her 50 or more donation quilts will be finished and donated in the next few months. We are pleased to do it in her honor and memory and her family is ever-so grateful. Do you have a "final arrangements plan" for your stash? Since none of us will live forever, that's not a bad idea. 

Let's quilt,

Barbara