This summer we learned unfortunate news that a friend of ours had been diagnosed with breast cancer.  She is in her mid-50’s with a husband and a teenage daughter who is just starting her senior year of high school.  I can’t imagine anything more scary than a life threatening illness.  Her husband said they caught it early and she was immediately undergoing treatment.  You can imagine that when someone you love is very sick, you want to provide care and comfort.  Those of us who are affected by a loved one who receives such a diagnosis feel so helpless!  She lives in another state so what could I do?  Why, make her a quilt of course!

I searched the web and found 2.5″ pre-cut strips of Pinking of You, by Wilmington Essentials, which I thought would be perfect.  The link above is for a mini-strip set, so if you want to make the same size I did, you’ll need to purchase two of them.  I’m sure she doesn’t have a single pink thing in her house and it won’t match at all, but that’s not the point.  I thought I had bought the 10″ squares and when the fabric arrived I looked at it and thought, “What am I going to do with this?”  After more web searching for ideas (because I’m missing the Creative gene), I decided on what Missouri Star Quilt Company has termed a Jelly Roll Race.  You just start sewing all those strips end-to-end so they are long enough to wrap around your house! When you get to the end, you start sewing it to itself, over and over, until you run out of strips.  It’s a pretty quick sew.  Here’s a video of how to.

I removed the lighter cream strips from the set and got to it.

I wanted to add a Pink Ribbon to the quilt top so I found one on the internet and printed it out.  Then I traced a line drawing of the outside edges, scanned the tracing into my Brother ScanNCut 650W, and it cut out a perfect fabric ribbon out of a batik I had in my stash.  I love that machine!  I attached it to the top with a blanket stitch.

I wondered if she might haul this thing to treatments and I know those rooms can be very cold so I decided to back it in Minky.  What a mess!  That stuff shreds like nobody’s business!  I picked it up at Joann’s Fabrics along with flannel for the middle vs. the traditional batting.  The Minky is pretty heavy stuff all by itself.  I picked up the fabric for the borders from my local Scrappy Quilter shop.  The quilting pattern is Loopy Hearts from Intelligent Quilting.

In an effort to speed up the process to get this to her as quickly as possible, I made a terrible mistake of adding the binding during the longarm process, which I had never done before.  I’m an expert binder and thought, “How hard can this be?”  My friends, take it from me, DON’T do this on a gift project if you’re not up to speed with it.  What a disaster!  It took longer to fix the mistakes in the binding than it would have to do it my usual way from the get-go.  Even now, it looks like a 4 year old did it.  Sorry my friend…let me know if it falls apart in the wash and I’ll pay the shipping to get it back, fix it right, and return it to you.  🙂

Well, I think she likes it!  I added a label to let her know she is wrapped in hugs and prayers.  I think it goes great with her décor.  Don’t you?

She is still undergoing treatment.  Your prayers for healing for my friend Mary would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you and God bless.