Tuesday 5 February 2013

Recovery Quilt




Mom at the beginning of chemo holding up the "Recovery Quilt"
 
In early January, 2009 we received the news that my Mom had stage 1 breast cancer.  After many hours of crying and weeks of feeling useless I decided I wanted to make my Mom something to comfort her during her recovery. 

I decided on a quilt.  I had several partially started projects and I knew the basics so I set to work.  I knew that if Mom couldn't go out much after surgery, chemo and radiation she'd love to have photos of the family, especially her grandchildren, around.

The centre medallion of the quilt read: "Marlene, Mom, Grandma"

I selected some photos - 24 actually and got to work cropping and printing on fabric, fusible paper.  Then I went to the fabric store and bought fabrics from the breast cancer research fund raiser line.  Within a couple of evenings the quilt was cut and pieced and ready for quilting and binding.  I convinced a local long-arm quilter to put me to the front of the line...with my no-quilting-experience, who knew it usually took weeks or months to get to the front of the queue!  It turned out to be a really large quilt...have to work on that part of the planning.

Close up of one square - my three beautiful nieces.
All in all, I was ecstatic with the end of the project and it was ready for Mom when she came home after surgery.  Mom recovered completely from breast cancer and is healthy.  Thank God for that!
Close up of the borders, these are the breast cancer fabrics.