Day Nine: Making Progress

I'm not sure what my mother would think. I have re-purposed various items of hers when she was alive, and she seemed fine with it, so I would like to imagine she would have no problem with what I'm doing now.

What I'm doing is cutting up her puff quilt and using the fabric to make two of my three quilt projects, the postage stamp and the hexagon. 

My feeling is that my mother didn't like the quilt very much in the end. It was a memory quilt. She was trying to reduce her fabric stash, so each puff was made from some fabric leftover from some garment or project that she made. Each puff was like a little pillow stuffed with pillow stuffing. Sorry to get all technical on you.

She made it for my parent's bed, a king size, so the thing is huge, and as I rip it apart, I'm noticing that her sewing machine had tension problems, and I just know that bugged her royally. But she didn't rip it out and do it over. She was done with it. Just get'er done. I can still see that determined look in her eyes. Just get the damn thing done!

Thirty years later my brother brings it to me. It smells like 30 years of garage dust. All the puffs are probably full of dust mites. The thought of this makes me choke a bit and my stomach kind of flips too.

  

So the game plan is cut the quilt apart, throw away the stuffing, wash the fabric, iron the fabric, and cut out hexes and squares. The execution is slow and I'm finding using scissors painful, so I may have to switch to a knife.

  

So here at Day Nine I am making progress and I'm enjoying meeting up with the memories of some of the fabrics. 

  

As far as the manly quilt goes, well that's an entirely different story.