Welcoming Threads - The Weaving of a Quilt

A box with all of the fabric for this quilt came to church member and artist SarahAnne Hazlewood on the death of a family friend.

Sash – who loves bright fabrics best – passed it to me (Kristan Burkert) as more my style. I was delighted. There is a joke among quilters about our love of fabric: “She who dies with the most fabric wins” and this was a lot of fabric. In this case though, it seemed sad, because the quilter had carefully labeled each cut of fabric for its purpose in an unknown pattern.

She had a plan we’ll never know. I wanted to get this out in the world as a finished quilt. The large quantity of backing fabric seemed like a perfect match to the need for a queen-sized comforter for the Refugee Care Collective project.

Refugee Care Collective is a non-profit organization that mobilizes Portlanders to help refugee families

rebuild their lives. Bridgeport’s Justice & Witness team helped the congregation sign up for five “restart kits,” of which this comforter was one piece.

For quilters, the blocks in the outer border are the Damask Rose block from Layer Cake, Jelly Roll and

Charm Quilts by Pam & Nicky Lintott. The central motif is Birthday Gift, designed by Annie Harris, in Jelly

Roll Inspirations, compiled by the same authors. The unpieced inner and outer borders and the binding

were labeled for those purposes by the original quilter. Figuring out how to use the rest was the fun

creative challenge. It felt good to give the fabric a purpose again, this time to welcome an Iraqi family to

Oregon.

You can view pictures of this unique quilt in the gallery below.