Sunflowers

 

Last spring when we went to Texas for Joe's sister's funeral, we spent a lot of time with Janice's older son Steve and his lovely wife Lisa. It turned out that Janice had begun to make a quilt for them and passed away before it was finished.

The next day we went out to Janice's home and I looked at the "sunflower" blocks. There were twenty-five of them! Twenty were finished except for some of the centers, all hand-buttonhole stitched. Five were all pinned in place. I told Lisa and Steve that I'd take the blocks home and finish the quilt, but I'd likely not get to it until September.

It turned out that the buttonholing made a nice evening hand-work project. The blocks were very large and Lisa had mentioned that a king-size quilt had been the plan.

So I ordered some brown fabric to match the sunflowers' centers and asked Lisa to send me the left-over fabric, hoping there would be enough to make cornerstones. 

Once my then-current project was assembled and off to the quilter, I put the Sunflowers up on the wall and started cutting lattice and cornerstones.  Janice's hand-stitching was reflective of her age, and I knew that the machine quilting needed to be closer than I usually prefer. Mary Ellen did her usual wonderful job; the binding took the better part of a week, and the finished quilt reached Lisa yesterday.

She likes it.