She came to us with a laundry basket full of her father’s clothes wanting to create something nice to remember him by. She didn’t know exactly what she wanted, but wanted to use as many of his clothes that she had to make a quilt.
Sometimes you can tell a lot about a person from their clothing. From the laundry basket, we could see that he liked to bowl as there were 2 red bowling shirts. He also like race cars and racing. There were a lot of those. He loved the water, fishing and sailing. He was a volunteer firefighter.
For the design she didn’t want anything ordinary, but something different. We always start with the design so we got to work and this is the result. The Hell Rock centerpiece was a lot different for us. To make that we adapted a traditional quilt pattern until we got to something that she liked. The star points and circles around Hell Rock and the Fire Department patch, bottom center, were all cut from our adapted pattern and sewn together individually. The shirts being on an angle was different, too. It posed a challenge to get everything to fit together, but we made it work.
A lot of the solid-color pieces on the front were from his clothing. We reused part of the bowling shirts, for instance, in order to create the red triangles. The brown and white print came from one of his shirts. Reusing clothing helps the environment by helping to keep those items out of our landfills.
For the main fabric, we searched around to find those with a nautical theme and presented several to our customer. She liked the teal, yellow, and red sailboat fabric so that was used for the borders and around the shirts on the front. The fabric complements a blue and white sailing shirt that he wore that was also included.
The front was finished and with her approval we got started on the back. She approved our mockup of the back. This was constructed using predominantly cotton clothing fabric and purchased nautical fabrics. The design is interlocking triangles known in quilting as half-square triangles. It’s an entirely different look from the front, but is what she liked. All of our quilts are reversible so the back can be the front or the front the back making it easy to make changes to your décor as desired.
The pain of losing a loved one can be so difficult — not having that person’s physical presence around any more. Still, “those we love never truly leave us.” “There are things that death cannot touch.” – Jack Thorne
The quilt becomes a surrogate. It’s not him, but it can be held and hugged just as if it was. Our quilts are designed to last a long time. Our customer now has a perpetual reminder of fatherly, eternal love. Love never dies.
