UGLY Quilt

My friend Fe' showed me the quilt her sister-in-law made for her as a Christmas gift last year, an UGLI Quilt. Made with various fabrics, even with some from Fe's mom's fabric stash, and patches from all the places that she has lived, with instructions for adding more patches as necessary.

The next day, when I was commiserating with Stacy about Danielle's upcoming move, we got the genius idea to make an UGLY Quilt for Danielle. We don't care about the places she's lived before or the places she may yet live in, we just want her to remember us. We got right to work. We decided to make it truly ugly by using scrap fabric pieces from other projects. To make it more interesting, we only used each fabric once on the quilt. This caused us to run out of fabric, so we called Danielle and asked that since she was moving, could we have some of her fabric scraps. She was completely unsuspecting and happily gave us a box. Instead of using patches to mark all of the cool things around town that her family will miss, we used Stacy's embroidery machine. We envision this quilt being used for picnics in the park, not being put on a bed -- although what an honor that would be for the person who slept under it ;) -- so we wanted a fabric that would be really sturdy and not let water soak through right away (sometimes the sprinklers run the morning you go to the park). After walking around JoAnn Fabric for a while, we came across a denim that really lends itself to the UGLY Quilt title.


My mom recommended to me the Elm Creek Quilts series of books by Jennifer Chiaverini, which I also now recommend to others who like to read historical fiction and quilt. In those books, the characters are always talking about tags on the backs of quilts so you know more about the quilt and quilters, so of course I had to embroider one for this quilt. (I've decided that I really like how my handwriting looks embroidered, I may have to do this more often.)

Stacy and I pose with the finished quilt just after giving it to Danielle.
And we 3 test it out on Danielle's front lawn.

Right after we tied the quilt, I had it on the floor to get the binding pinned up. Clara and Roderic were walking across it and every-so-often Clara would stop and say, "That's my dress! That's Amber's shirt! That's Roderic's chair! That's my jacket! That's Sara's dress!" etc. It just summed up for me this quilt...lots and lots of good memories.