The Sun and The Moon
These two quilt tops are projects I have been creating for a client. She had lost her husband a few years ago and struggled to part with his clothing in her grief. Eventually she contacted me and requested I make some quilts using his shirts. The first set, made a year or so ago, was designed for a daughter’s young twins, and had a dot theme. She then requested a pair of quilts for another daughter. As any parent knows, you can’t gift one child something special without considering the other sibling! The idea was to have an image of a beach sunset due to the family’s love of Key West.
Figuring out a way to utilize only men’s shirts into a beach sunset image was a bit of a challenge. Eventually I found a pattern designed by Karen S. Biglik of Fabric Addict called “Sunset at Sea” (https://www.fabricaddict.net/). The pattern uses 16 different fabrics and is rather complex, not from the sewing perspective but due to the design requirements. The construction requires each fabric to be used in specific places, thus creating the visual of the sun’s reflection in the water. To accomplish this with the shirts, I had to adjust the pattern’s key to reflect my fabric choices. And then the anxiety set in.
The quilt directions specified how much of each fabric was needed IN YARDAGE…and I had shirts. I was leery of not having enough fabric since I was using the husband’s shirts and clearly couldn’t dash to a store to get more. What to do if I ran out? How to figure out if I would have enough? I purchased a shirt from a thrift shop and chopped it up to see how much I could expect to get. Turns out, you can actually cut a lot of useful pieces from a shirt. However, the pattern direction specified cutting yardage into strips and sub cutting those to get the pieces needed. I didn’t have that luxury so I had to calculate each fabric’s specific size pieces and cut individually. Sigh.
Construction involved a great deal of zip lock baggies with labels, piles of units and a lot of swearing. Once done with the Sunset top, I discovered an error – I was rather surprised there was only one! The photo above still has the error in it though I have fixed it in the meantime. The client loved the work and I was left mulling what to do about a second quilt. Some of the shirts would not produce enough fabric to create the same top again, and, to be honest, I really didn’t want to make two nearly identical quilts. Boring. After a bit of thought, I asked her if she might like the second quilt to be a moon rise. She loved the idea. Having already worked through the challenges, the moon was a tad easier except for the coloring.
My color palette for the moon was cool colors – blues, grays and whites of which there were oodles of shirts. I wanted the sky to seem like a gray evening but when I began creating the image, it was rather dull. I pieced the ocean sections together but left the sky in strips on my design wall to assess. The most obvious solution was to create “stars” in the night sky. To do so I had to disassemble some blocks, make tiny half square triangles of the corresponding background color with yellow, and then piece them back together. Another sigh.
I think the resulting quilts work well and, once quilted, the client is excited to share them with her daughter. While they could be considered a “baby quilt” in size, I think of them more as wall art, proclaiming to a beloved that “you are my sunshine” and “I love you to the moon and back”.