It's roughly 84 inches square, which makes it about queen size. It also makes it difficult to get photos unless two people are holding it up with a third to take the picture. Some wonderful ladies in the quilt club I just joined came to my rescue for these. (I've edited out the personal details on the label for privacy.) I will say that the label starts with "In Loving Memory," and includes: her details and the work she did on the quilt, a photo of her, and my details with credit to "repairs, borders, quilting, and binding." Also dates, because dates are important to the history of a quilt.
For anyone who wonders what pattern was used, well it's like this. She started with The Ladies of Downton Abbey by Needle in A Hayes Stack but somewhere, probably during the early stages of chemo, decided that she didn't want the blocks on point. Honestly I have to think hard about blocks on point without the "benefit" of chemotherapy so I can see why she opted to reorient them.
The picture below shows that she altered the pattern again by making the blocks more scrappy than the pattern called for; three different fabrics instead of two. (Photo was take prior to quilting.) Also when my friend pieced the blocks, her seam allowance was a hair on the large side, so the blocks are a tad bit smaller than what the pattern said they'd be. But their size was consistent.... which told me she pieced them before the chemo really got to her.
As for the borders, they're all my creation. The first just echoes the sashing strips, a 2.5 inch, width of fabric cut (2 per side) all around. The cream border was cut at 3.5 inches so it would be a bit larger and more of a place to rest the eyes from the two busy sections.
The piano key outer border was fashioned by sewing strip sets of all the leftover fabrics and then cutting off 4.5 inch sections perpendicular to the seam lines. I did fiddle with the order here and there and sometimes cut individual 4.5" x 2.5" sections to keep the border from having a repetitive pattern. The corners were capped off with 4.5 inch squares of the binding fabric.
I picked the fabric for the binding because it's purple and that was my friend's favorite color. I also used a large swathe of it on the back of the quilt. Incidentally, you can make over 11 yards of double fold bias binding that is cut 3 inches wide from a 36 inch square of fabric.
I really hope she'd love this if she could see it. And I hope someday when her grandchildren are telling their grandchildren about her, they will say, "making a quilt is so much work and not everyone is worthy of such a gift. You can imagine how much your great-great grandma was loved that someone finished this quilt after she went to Heaven."
Because she was.
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