Quilts and Books

In my February posts about my sister, I mentioned that she gave me a ton of her stuff--fabric, tools, a machine, and lots of partially completed projects. I brought it all home, stacked in the guest room and tried to figure out where to store it all. Gradually, I organized it, re-arranged some of my own stuff, and figured out how to put it away. It was an emotional process and it took months. I didn't always get a lot of sewing done; it was hard to find the energy as I continued to get used to her being gone. A few months before she passed away, Char handed me this particular quilt and insisted that I finish it soon. It's actually a quilt top that I made for her back in 2006. She sent me the pattern and fabric and asked me to make just the top. She was going to use it in the book she was writing. When I was finished I sent her the completed top, the pattern, and the leftover fabric. In the book, it's used to demonstrate a basting technique. So she basted the layers tog...

To those of you who offered me your condolences on the passing of my sister, I want to say thank you again for your kind words. It meant so much to me. It has really helped to finally talk about it. So now I want to brag on my sister just a little bit. She really was exceptionally creative with her quilting; she put a lot of thought into the quilting of the quilt. Rather than try to tell you about it in my words, I'll just let these pictures of her quilts speak about it. First up this is a little baby quilt. If you click to enlarge you'll see the pattern of flowers, leaves, and stems quilted in red and green. Here's the quilt she did for the QBFF paint chip challenge back in 2011. I currently have this one hanging in my kitchen nook. I love looking at it. The small sections quilted with the rainbow variegated thread are a great touch. The center section is quilted with metallic thread. This is not easy to do. It requires the right needle in your...

57 years. 3 months. 15 days. That's how old my sister was when she died on December 30, 2015. Char spent four and a half years in a tug of war with cancer. For a while there she seemed to be in total control. But that insidious disease came back and this time would not let up. Here's the kicker. She had uterine cancer, just like me. Only hers was Stage 4 when they found it. Mine barely qualified as Stage 1. Life is often unfair, but that seemed the cruelest irony of all. As I wept that she was dying, she wept because I was not. It's taken me a long time to process this and to be willing to talk openly about it. Some of you reading this have been very open with your own struggles with health, grief, death, and dying. I've wanted to be, but I think I needed for the worst of it to be over first. Every time I tried to write about it, I'd sit paralyzed at the keyboard. I just wasn't ready I guess. Char decided to suspend further treatment last August. It wa...