There’s always something special to me about making a memorial quilt in honor of another artist. So when Allene asked me to create two quilts and two pillows in memory of her late husband, Tony – an author, a professor of writing, and a jazz guitar player – I was naturally intrigued. In addition to his love of writing, teaching, and playing music, Tony also loved being in and around the ocean. With that information in mind, I began creating two custom designs that would reflect Tony’s life passions.

Allene sent me two boxes of Tony’s clothes – the “blue box” and the “brown box” – although truth be told, the “brown box” only contained one officially brown garment, the rest were a mixture of tans, greens, reds, oranges, and yellows.

I began designing the blue quilt first – blue to represent Tony’s love of the water – and I kept thinking about what the library of both an author and a professor of writing might look like. An image of uneven stacks of books came to mind which I then translated into quilt-form.

The blue garment group contained a helpful gradation from light to dark with which I was able to delineate one “book stack” from the next.

The lightest stack essentially became the spine of the quilt.

When I went to photograph in-process details, I loved all of the smaller compositions I could extract from the larger design.

As is often the case when there are enough larger garment sections remaining after the quilt front is finished, I like to piece together the back.

 

Here is the finished quilt, which I entitled, Tony’s Library.

And two details:

The second quilt, to be made from the garments from the “brown box”, contained a more complex color story.

Thematically, I was interested in figuring out how to visually express Tony’s connection to jazz music. I have made a few past quilts that honored musicians, and each time it was important to me to create a sense of repetition, tempo, and phrasing. Tony also had many big projects going on simultaneously, which led me to the image of chevrons – repeating arrows pointing in different directions.

Each chevron section had a different grouping of repeating fabrics, which could represent different phrases in music as well as Tony’s different creative projects.

Here is the final quilt.

A detail:

Here are the two pillows, both made with garments from the “brown box”.

I want to thank Allene for having the courage to send her beloved Tony’s garments all the way across the country. It was a true pleasure to make these remembrance pieces.