The Request

I really should have started this blog on New Year's Eve 2010. That was the day Betty, my mother-in-law, gave me the quilt. We were at the farm, and she was pulling out boxes and bags of items she wanted to discard, save or give to her daughters Carole and Susie or her son, my husband Jim. We found photos, some linen napkins, a few pieces of china, a lovely large handwoven basket and a small mountain of carefully folded material squirreled away in boxes stored in the back bedroom.

She pulled out a large plastic container and opened the lid. This box held an unfinished quilt top. Betty unfolded it, smoothing out the creases with her hands and invited me to take a look.

A garden of multicolored irises bloomed on a white background. It was one of those kits you could buy, like a paint-by-number, only this was a stitch-by-the-number. Betty had finished all the border flowers and buds, and a lot of the irises that adorned the center of the quilt. She also had cut out all the pieces that still needed to be appliqued to the top. The pieces were sorted by color, pinned together and safely parceled in a plastic bag, along with another bag holding scraps, a third bag filled with skeins of embroidery thread, still another packed with spools of thread matching the quilt pieces, and an old checkbook check box used for storing extra needles.

Dotted blue lines shaped long leaves and the flowers that still needed to bloom. They stood out like white shadows against the pink, magenta and peach petals already in place.

"I'd like you to finish it, if you want to," she said.

Betty started the quilt years ago, working on it bit by bit over the years. But at 85, arthritis and the onset of macular degeneration began to limit what she could do.

We've always shared a love of crafts and needlework, and despite the fact I'd never really done any applique work, I said yes. How could I not? And why not? I work part-time at two different jobs, one with regular hours, the other as a freelance writer for one of our local newspapers and a friend's Web site. I would start after the holiday decorations were packed away and I could take a closer look at the pieces, the pattern, what would need to be embroidered once the applique work was done. Piece of cake, right? So I packed up the quilt and took it home.