I believe many of us from a certain generation can relate to having held on to a box of our mother’s or grandmother’s table linens which we don’t have the heart to discard, nor do we want to bust out our irons every time we have a dinner party.

Loulie, like me, belongs to that club. She wanted to honor her late mother Louisa by giving her mother’s gorgeous linens a new form which she could see every day as a quilt on her bed. She loved my Eclipse quilt pattern that lends itself to a largely white background, and she had some great ideas for the color accents that make up the rest of the design.

Louisa’s linens had some lovely embroidered details and textures, as well as a variety of monogrammed treatments.

There was a good deal of fabric prep needed to be done to cut the background blocks in a way that placed the open stitching segments in the right places but also didn’t waste too much fabric.

Once that was done, I began to lay out the accent color strips, working one quilt quadrant at a time.

I mixed and matched adjacent textures and fabrics, highlighting certain frames that were particularly lovely.

I had to establish a repetitive system of sewing everything together to keep each piece in the right place.

Loulie chose a deep purple fabric for the middle criss-cross, and I framed a crocheted circular element at the very center.

There were more monogrammed pieces than Loulie and I thought would look good in a single quilt, so I suggested I place a sampling of three in each of the lower corners of the quilt.

Loulie also requested a multi-colored binding using all of the accent colors.

Here is the final king size quilt, followed by some details.