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 gallbladder 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 4 visual layers. There would be the view beyond the window that included the Charlotte skyline, The second layer would be a flower garden just outside the window. The third layer would be the window where messages from loved ones are written and then the quilting which create an image in front of the window would be the 4th layer.
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.
