My friend Shannen recently lost her daughter Sarah to a form of brain cancer called DIPG. She and her husband founded Sarah's Dreams (sarahsdreams.org) to increase awareness and raise money for research for this disorder. I made my first rag quilt for their next fund-raising auction.
First, I designed the pattern - gray and purple are the colors of the organization and the gray ribbon is the symbol for brain cancer, so I decided to go with a gray ribbon and dark purple background on the front and light purple ribbon and gray background on the back. Next, I cut my flannel fabrics in 5 inch squares (final size 4 inch squares, given a 0.5 inch seam allowance). As the pattern was 15x15 the final size of the quilt would be 5 feet x 5 feet. I cut the low loft cotton batting into 3.5 inch squares. The next step is to make the quilt sandwiches:
Here are all of my quilt sandwiches:
I laid out the quilt on my bedroom floor:
Then sewed it together, being particularly careful of the seams along the outline of the light purple ribbon on the back. I only had to re-do one or two of them to make everything line up perfectly!
Next, I clipped and clipped and clipped the seams until they all were raggedy. A few runs through the washer and dryer resulted in a perfectly raggedy quilt!
The last step was to add a quilt label.
I'm am hoping that it will help to raise a nice sum to help fund DIPG research. Miss you Sarah.
