Alzheimer's Priority Quilt

Tick tock, tick tock. I work well with a deadline. Did you know that? It has always been so with me. This deadline was given to me on July 10: I needed to take an Alzheimer's Priority Quilt with me to the filming of The Quilt Show on August 10. Four weeks, that's all the time I had, and one of those weeks was for registration. Gulp.

What to do? I wanted to reflect the chaos an Alzheimer's patient must feel, but how to do so? Over breakfast on Monday July 12, the design started to coalesce. Sometimes I don't have to draw a design to have it work, but most of the time it is a good thing to do so the bugs can be worked out.

The first thing I did was to find the Dover book of copyright free silhouettes in my library. After thumbing through the whole book, I found one buried amid all the others on a page.

The silhouette was sized in Adobe Photoshop and then printed, transferred to a paper backed fusible web (yes I thought about printing directly to the web, but I have a very temperamental printer), fused and cut from some black/gray fabric.

For the background, I used commercially printed 100% cotton fabric that resembles the marbled end pages in an old book. The fabric was just too bright and rich for the look I wanted so I used the reverse side.

I needed to construct a new 'silk' screen so I purchased some wooden canvas stretchers and a bit of polyester chiffon from a local craft store. Here the frame is build and the chiffon is stapled on; the next step involves a lot of duct tape (wonderful stuff) and scrubbing with cleanser.

Et voila! The screen is ready for use.

I love words and letters on a quilt and this one is no exception. I found that I still had the dexterity to wield an Xacto knife with the skill needed to cut the stencil. When cutting a paper stencil for screening you need to think through what to leave and what to remove. Do you see the bars I left? I removed those once I had the stencil in place and ready to use. Love the font, it was perfect for this application.

I pulled two screens onto paper and then did the screening on fabric. Ah, success! Once the fabric paint dried it was heat set with the iron and the silhouette fused on in the same session. The silhouette was stitched down using an ekg-style free motion stitch. Then the quilt was sandwiched and ready to quilt.

Finished!