Lifesavers

As promised, I've finally found time to do a post about the quilt I'm donating for Relay for Life.

This quilt started out MANY years ago at a family reunion on my mom's side.  My mom and two of her sisters are quilters, so you can probably guess that visiting quilt shops is on the to-do list when the family gets together.  I don't know what book it came from, but someone decided we should all make quilts where we swap 2.5" strips of fabric, so off we went to buy fabric.

I wish I had photos of the fabrics all together or the cutting process or any of that, but unfortunately this was WAY before I was blogging.  Maybe before blogs existed?  (Okay, maybe it wasn't that long ago!)

I was excited at the prospect when everyone was together, but once I got home, my interest waned.  There were other projects with pressing deadlines.  And then I ran out of fabric (I have no idea if I took too few strips or if I made my quilt too big or what).  And it sat in a box for a long while.

I believe it was after I started blogging over at APQ that I dug it back out, dug through my stash, and got the top together.  At least the part of getting the top together happened that recently because I have this photo I shared back then.

And then it went back into a box.  Because I didn't need it.  I didn't even really like it that much.  And I didn't feel it was appropriate to get rid of a quilt that was made in such a sisterly manner.

Then Judy L set out her UFO challenge.  I mentioned it to my mom and, for reasons I'll never guess at, she asked if this quilt was on the list.  No, it wasn't, because my UFO list was to finish quilts into tops only, not quilting them.  But even if quilting tops was part of my own UFO challenge, this one wouldn't have made the cut for the same reasons it went into a box. 

And then the hubby came home one day and asked if I'd donate a quilt to be raffled off as a fundraiser for his work's Relay for Life team and a lightbulb went off.  My mom is a cancer survivor.  Cancer has touched her family in many other ways.  I couldn't imagine that the sisters would disapprove of my choice of what to do with this quilt, but I asked my mom anyways.  She thought it was a great idea.

Then came the scramble.  I thought I had just a week and a half to complete it, but thankfully I'd used my new longarm a few times and felt confident I could do an overall stipple/meander to get it quilted and thankfully I had enough time to find thread and a back before my limited amount of daylight on the one weekend left in my 9 day time frame passed.

Thankfully everything went quite well in the quilting and binding.  And in the meantime I found out they weren't going to give it away so soon.  (Good choice, in my opinion - more time to raise funds!)  But I still got it finished and finally last week put a label on it.

It's still not been raffled off, though they considered doing it at the winter safety party a few weekends back.  It was decided to hold off even longer in an effort to raise more funds.  From what I understand, there are a number of people dedicating a small portion of each paycheck to raffle tickets JUST for this quilt!  I'm very happy it's generating this much interest and hope one of those dedicated people wins it.

It measures about 56x72.

Happy quilting,

Katie

PS Here are photos of two of the other three quilts that were made with these fabrics.

This was made by one of my aunts, but I'm not sure which.

And this one was made by my mom, the overachiever who put ice cream cones around the outside.  (I think she was kicking herself for that decision when she had to sew the binding on, though!)

And the last quilt.  A photo generously sent by the aunt whos quilt was missing when I first posted this.  A complete set - yay!