Grandma's Aprons

 Today I officially started the apron quilt. I'm excited about this one because of it's emotional significance. When Grandpa Great died almost two years ago, my mother in law decided to put her mother in an assisted living center so she could get the care she needed. That meant cleaning out her mother's home and selling it to help pay for the assisted living. In the cleaning out process, we came across these old aprons of Grandma Greats and because they were so old and worn, they got tossed in the dumpster. Well, I jumped right in and pulled them out of the garbage and snuck them into my car.

I knew when I pulled them out of the garbage that I wanted to make a quilt out of them, but it wasn't until now that I decided it was time. My mother in law has a hard life. She works full time, cares for her husband who is physically disabled and struggles with mental illness, and she cares for her mother, the one time owner of these aprons. She's a great woman and with her birthday coming up at the end of March, I thought now was the time to make her gift. A quilt made from her mother's old aprons.

I looked for just the right pattern and settled on this one .... pixelated heart, from the Robert Kaufman website ... I liked that it was simple and I liked that it would portray love. The process started with deconstructing the aprons and getting them ironed .... it was fun to have little cracker crumbs fall out of the pockets and when I ironed them, they smelled like Grandma Great.

Some of them were pretty worn, and I knew I wanted to keep some of that unique stuff in the quilt ... like this patch.

And some of the aprons were so worn that I ironed on a featherweight interface to stabilize them a bit better so they'd last longer in the quilt.

Then I got to cutting. I decided on 4" squares.

Here's a few of the squares with the apron details I wanted to keep. I love them!

My lovely little stack of 4" apron squares.

Then I started laying them out. I'm excited to see this come together!