My mom has cancer.
No matter how many times I’ve said this over the past couple of weeks it doesn’t feel real. My mother, the last living member of my immediate family, has cancer.
While cancer has affected and, in some cases, taken the lives of those close to my family, it has avoided us. I always figured that with everything that we have been through, we might be spared. But that didn’t stop the call on November 1st from my mom letting me know she had been diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma.
Right after letting me know she had cancer, my mother promptly told me she didn’t want a pink quilt. I told her since she had commandeered Bat’s quilt, she already had a pink quilt.
Of course I was going to make my mom a treatment quilt, just not a pink one. My mother keeps me in fabric. She constantly picks up fabric she thinks will look good in a quilt and ships it down to me. Most of the time I have no clue what to do with it and it sits in my stash until I figure out something. Such was the case with the Ella layer cake by Windham Fabrics that she found.
My mother absolutely fell in love with this line of fabric. I was at a loss on how to use it and still highlight the fabric. After getting the call, I knew this would be the fabric I used for her quilt. Racking my brain for a pattern, I realized I had never made a disappearing nine patch quilt. This turned out to be the perfect opportunity.
Sewing the 10 inch squares together I understood why most patterns have the squares smaller. Disappearing nine patch is a wonderful beginner quilt pattern, but if you are starting out, definitely go with smaller squares.
Since I sat on this fabric for so long, I could not find any yardage in the line for backing. When I do quilts like this, I try really hard to use the same line for borders and backing. On Black Friday, I scoured the internet looking something that potentially matched. Thankfully I found Blue Leaves from the Chicken Scratch collection by Kaye England for Wilmington Prints. Not only did it come close, but looks wonderful with the rest of the quilt.
I didn’t finish the quilt in time for her surgery, but I did manage to finish it just in time for her treatment to start. Like everything else we have gone through, we will make it through this.
I have faith that my mom will be picking out fabric for quilts for a long time.
