Love of Threads: It arrived, I can blog

This above quilt started in my head in September last year. We went to Jena, Germany, to celebrate the wedding of Alex and Dolores. We stayed at my cousin Eva's house, mother of the groom.

Eva lost her husband Arno in November the previous year due to illness. We got to know Arno when we visited Jena before and when Arno, Eva and Alex came to Virginia for Sarah and Wade's wedding in 2011. We had such a great time then.
I asked Eva whether she still had some of Arno's shirts and she did. She gave me 8, all cotton. It was a bit of a challenge because we already had more luggage then we should have but everything made it home ... a day after us. Sure it wasn't the shirts fault,

First I cut the shirts apart at the seams.

I had seen this quilt here http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com and liked it. The original seems to be 100+ years old. As you can see its a very old pattern ... except that I didn't have a pattern. Well, don't really need one.

I had 8 shirts and cut 9 squares each. So I cut:
72 squares 6 1/2 x 6 1/2
180 sashes 2 1/2 x 6 1/2
90 cornerstones 2 1/2 x 2 1/2
720 star points 1 1/2 x 1 1/2
Btw, the "pastel pink" sashes (I googled to find a correct name > it also could be close to a Mountbatten pink) are from a shirt James had to sacrifice.

I like to be efficient and do "chain sewing" when I work on quilts. I learned quickly that when I sew the first star point from the middle to the outside ...

... and the second star point from the outside in, they come out much better.

Since I didn't have a pattern I had to make my own decisions. I decided to cut the middle out but leave the back fabric. This is usually not done but it made a much more accurate work when I sewed the squares and sashes together (lining up the sashes and not the points).

I pushed to have it done just before we went to visit with Helen and family so it could be quilted by my "longarmer" Linda in Nashville (pattern: crazy puzzle) and is about 66 x 75 inches.

One of the squares I fuzzy cut to incorporate one of the pockets which all had Arno's initials AS on them. It's on the very right of the third row from the bottom. That's were I put the card when I mailed it.

I had asked Linda to please not to quilt over it so the pocket would be closed. She was concerned when I picked it up that there was a bit of a "bare" patch on the back. She thought I needed to put some "fake" stitches on the back. I told her not to worry. Perfect place for the label!