Remembering Bill

It's hard to believe that my stepdad passed away 13 years ago.  At the time, he and mom were living in San Diego and Howard and I were living in Needham, Massachusetts.  Bill stayed in a nursing home for nine months after having a debilitating stroke.  My mom had already retired and was able to be at his side constantly.  She would visit him twice a day for several hours to make sure that he was being taken care of properly.  I never saw him alive after his stroke because we lived so far away.

Bill always called me the human loom because I was always knitting something different every time he saw me.  In Needham, I continued to knit but also started to quilt.  After Bill passed away, I helped mom go through his clothes and discovered a bunch of blue flannel pajama bottoms and thought they would make a great quilt to remember him by.  He was obsessed with flying and airplanes so I backed the quilt with some airplane fabric that I found at the Franklin Mill Store in Franklin, Massachusetts.  I can't believe that I remember that! (Confession, I remembered the location of the shop, but had to look up its name.)

I created a plane template out of a manila folder and traced it with quilter's chalk in the non nine-patch squares.  I quilted each plane separately and back stitched the heck out of each starting and stopping point - hoping that it would hold through multiple washings.  Time will tell.

Here's the plane fabric that I used for the backing.  Also, I used my favorite technique of pieced binding.  I love the "scrappiness" of it.

PS  The interface on blogger has not changed one bit in my three-year absence, which is both a blessing and very disappointing.