Quilts Left Behind

  

Cat or dog?

This morning I was ironing a label on a quilt that I'm donating to a project of the East Bay Heritage Quilters to make quilts for victims of Hurricane Sandy.

 

The quilt I'm contributing is one I made for my Aunt Phyllis in 2002, when she was diagnosed with a terminal illness.  I thought I was making a quilt with cats on it--cats were her passion.  Alas, it turned out the animals on the print were dogs, not cats, and she was never that crazy about it.  After she died in 2004, the quilt came back to me.

Re-named "Doggies"

While I was ironing,  I thought about the other quilts I've made for people who were sick.  One was for my sister-in-law, Delilah, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2003 and didn't have long to live.  I found out right  before Christmas, and I was beside myself.  She was just a fewer years younger than I was, and I really liked her. 

The only thing I could think of to do was to make her a quilt.   In a week, I made one from flannel prints, cut free-form, kind of wild, which is what I knew she'd like.  I shipped it to her via FedEx and tracked the package every step of the way.

Delilah's quilt, 2003

When she died several months later,  Jerry's brother gave the quilt back to me. I haven't been able to give it away.  It's so much Delilah.  The last time I saw her,  she was lying under it.

Then in 2011, my long-time friend Rob, whom I'd known since junior high, was quite ill with a cancer similar to Delilah's.   I'd been to his spacious, very modern home in the West Hollywood hills, so I made a quilt with to go with the black-and-blue-and-white decor:

The colors aren't well represented  here, but you get the idea

 I gave this quilt to Rob while we were having lunch one afternoon in Walnut Creek.  He seemed bowled over. He told me a story about one of his grandmothers, who held quilting bees at her house in order to be social, but after everyone left, she'd pull out all their stitches and re-do them.

I don't know where Rob's quilt is now--in LA, perhaps, with his partner, Emanuel.

Gone, anyway.