Kathy's Memorial Quilt

In the mid '90's I lived in Virginia Beach and worked at NationsBank (now Bank of America). One of the people I worked with was Kathy Howes. She was smart, nice and funny. A couple of years before she came to work for me she was stricken with gall bladder cancer, a disease usually reserved for people over 80. She was cancer free for almost 3 years. It returned when she was 31. She tried every kind of experimental treatment available but nothing worked. She died in 1999 at 32.

​After the service I offered to make a quilt honoring Kathy. Little did I know I was getting into a project way over my head. I designed an attic windows with 3 visual layers. There would be the view beyond the window that included the Charlotte skyline and a flower garden. The window where messages from loved ones are written and then the quilting which create an image in front of the window.
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The skyline and mountains were the easy part. I hand appliqued blocks and then sent them off for people to decorate. It took a year before her parents could do their own blocks and I received about 60% of them back. I recreated the missing blocks and started putting it together. The garden took a long time to put together. I tried several methods and didn't like any of them. I eventually decided on fussy cutting flowers and fusing them to a base.
​Then it languished for a few years because I knew how I wanted to quilt it but couldn't figure out how to do it. Kathy had nieces and nephews that she was close to and I wanted the outline of Kathy passing a rose to the children. Her brother send me photos of the kids and a friend eventually did a sketch for me of the image I wanted. I used that to project onto tracing paper and then stitched through the tracing paper.
​This was quilted before I understood the concept of quilting equal density and that's why it doesn't hang perfectly straight.
​I didn't finish it until 2005 and it's far from perfect but her parents loved it.