Heirloom Memory Quilt

After my mom died, we had two weeks of time to fill before her funeral. Two weeks of being in a weird sort of limbo where we couldn’t quite put the traumatic events behind us and move forward.

During that time, I decided to take some of her shirts and make memory pillows for each one of her grandkids to take home with them after the funeral. It was a nice distraction from grieving and planning and being in my sewing room is very therapeutic for me. I spent a good amount of time in the quiet of my room, thinking and sewing and reminiscing as I took her shirts and made them into a special memory for our kids. I was happy with how they turned out and it was a very special thing for the kids to take home with them after all was said and done. My kids sleep beside them every night and hug them when they are missing grandma!

After I was finished, I knew I wanted to do something for myself. I had so many scraps left over from the pillows, plus other shirts that hadn’t been cut into. I decided I wanted to make myself a quilt.

For over a year, two bags of my mom’s shirts sat in my sewing room, waiting to be turned into a quilt. It wasn’t that I was procrastinating; I was just so busy that I didn’t have time to devote to making a quilt.

Thank goodness for Rachel Hollis! Ha ha. Seriously though, if you’ve read my posts before, you know what a Rachel Hollis fan I am. After reading her book last summer, I realized that goals are great but they are pretty useless if you don’t put any effort into accomplishing them. I decided to get serious about my goals for myself, and when I looked at those two bags of shirts I realized that this concept applies to all areas of my life, even personal projects. How long was I going to fool myself into thinking that I was going to make these shirts into a quilt? Thinking about it wouldn’t stitch the pieces together; I had to actually do the work!

It was late September when I finally decided it was time to start my quilt. Taking Rachel’s advice, I committed to doing something towards my goal each week, no matter how big or small. Some weeks I might only be able to cut out a few squares or sew only one row together. But next week is gonna come anyway and it could come with one row sewn, or none at all. What is the best way to eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

And that’s how it went. Some weeks I was only able to sew one row. In between sewing jobs or while I was waiting for an embroidery project to finish on my machine, I would cut out squares or sew pieces together. It was a labor of love and sometimes it seemed like I would never get it done going as slowly as I did, but here we are 7 months later, and my quilt is finished!! If I had continued telling myself that I didn’t have big chunks of time to sit down and make this quilt, I would’ve never finished. Bite-sized pieces.

I sent it in to get professionally quilted, as I don’t have a long arm machine to quilt on. When I got the call on Wednesday that the quilting was finished, I immediately went to pick it up and I neglected everything else for the rest of the day so that I could finish the binding, which was all stitched by hand. Thank you to my wonderful hubby who didn’t roll his eyes at this mad woman when I asked him to pick up burritos on his way home from work so that I didn’t have to pause to make dinner! It took about 3-4 hours to stitch the binding and my fingers were sore by the end, but I got it done! Here’s the final masterpiece!

I love looking at each piece and remembering my mom in specific moments wearing each shirt.

Like the shirt she wore when my last baby was born.

Or the shirt she wore to her surprise birthday party when all the grandkids sang to her and smothered her in hugs and kisses.

Or the shirt she wore on her vacation back east (I love this picture of her).

Or the gown that I bought for her that she wore during her last week of life.

Every scrap of fabric holds a special memory.

I decided to embroider meaningful patterns on to some of the squares. Except for a few squares, every piece used scraps from shirts she wore.

This square is one of my favorites. When I was a kid, my mom made herself an apron out of this fabric. She wore that apron for years! When sorting through her fabric bin, I found a leftover fabric from that apron, so I made a square and embroidered an apron on it.

Mom was a preschool teacher who loved Winnie-the-Pooh! She even decorated a bedroom for the grandkids in Winnie-the-Pooh. I made sure to include some of her Pooh shirts, along with her preschool shirts.

This square represents her three children.

I dedicated a square for my dad, the love of her life, and the temple that we were sealed in as a family.

Mom loved baking. She was a skilled cake decorator and loved sharing her talent with others.

I loved this square, taken from her shirt that she bought on her Hawaiian vacation. And the following picture of her “kiss me” jammies that she wore up until the very end of her life.

Anyone who has followed our dementia journey knows exactly what this square means!! My mom became obsessed with pb&j sandwiches over the span of her disease and it was literally the only thing (and nothing else) that she ate for the entire last year of her life. With LOTS of jelly!!

Mom loved to travel in their RV, so I had to include a square for that.

I included the purple ribbon for dementia awareness.

And of course, let’s not forget the centerpiece: an angel, my angel.

A lot of hours went into this quilt. And a lot of tears. Tears of happy memories, tears of sad memories. Tears of missing my mom and longing for a different outcome. Tears of joy when the final piece was completed. I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. I can’t describe the sweet and peaceful feeling of cuddling up to my mom’s shirts, which still bear her scent. What a precious heirloom to pass on to my own children someday. I am so happy to have this special quilt, and grateful for the book I read that taught me to make my goals a priority, that action is the only way to make a dream come true. It may seem like a little dream, but it was something that I desperately wanted to do and a task that seemed completely overwhelming. I did it, one square at a time!