From the moment I opened the large box of Bianca’s clothes, I knew this memorial quilt project would be a wild ride. The colors and patterns nearly exploded out of the box.

Bianca passed away in October of 2023, and her daughter Megan began searching for a way to transform her mother’s amazing collection of fashionable garments into remembrance pieces. My work caught her eye, and thus began a six-month, eight-quilt assignment to honor the life of Bianca. (This post will focus on four of the quilts, and a subsequent post will feature the other four quilts)

I had so many colors and patterns to work with, it took plenty of organization and strategy to find different combinations of fabrics that created their own distinct feeling and supplied enough fabric for each design.

Bianca’s daughter-in-law Carly curated her own color palette for her quilt, which was quite helpful and lovely.

Bianca was the daughter of Italian immigrants, and the story goes that she had a favorite uncle back in Italy who told her about the way sunflowers always move to face the sun, hence, her lifelong love of sunflowers. Carly chose a more traditional sunflower/star quilt pattern that I revised slightly in order to incorporate all of the fabrics in her grouping.

Below is a deconstructed ivory waffle-knit jacket that added some great texture to the overall quilt and ended up as the centers for all the sunflower blocks.

All the colors and different plaids had to be arranged in an intentionally random layout.

Sunflower center blocks…

Here I’m making sure that all of the textured white fabrics and all of the plain white fabrics are correctly paired up with each other in the spaces between the sunflowers.

I loved the little floral fabric in the offset blocks – it came from a super soft pair of overalls.

Here is the final quilt.

And here is a detail which shows one of the bees in the quilting pattern I chose – because in addition to sunflowers, Bianca loved bees!

Jenna’s quilt came next, also with a sunflower theme, but this time a single, giant sunflower. When I saw Bianca’s yellow blazer, I knew it would be perfect for a set of large sunflower petals.

It took a little work to figure out how to cut out all 24 petals from the odd shapes of a deconstructed blazer.

But it worked!

Then came the fun part of combining lots of colors and patterns for the large sunflower center.

I chose darker gray/green blocks as the backgrounds for the yellow petals so they would allow the petals and flower center to pop forward visually.

I was asked to include an appliquéd bee somewhere in the quilt as a little surprise.

Here is the final quilt.

And here is a detail with the Where’s Waldo appliquéd bee hiding out.

Next up was Megan’s quilt. She, too, wanted a sunflower theme, and specifically requested that I use as many colors and patterns as I could to fill her quilt. The pattern she chose involved making sure there were solid darks and lights in the right placements so that the sunflowers could be seen through all the fabric prints.

Here is my little placement/planning study…

And here is a closer look into all the fabulous prints and colors I got to work with…

Check out those jaguars!

Again, organization was key in keeping “everyone” straight. I say “everyone” because in my mind, the fabrics became their own little characters the more I got to work with them.

This was the place that eight fabric points came together, and I had to be careful which direction the seams were pressed.

On many of the garments, Megan had pinned little notes asking for them to be included in various other quilts if there was enough left over. I made sure to leave enough of those items to be included in each stipulated quilt. Here, the two blue square fabrics in the center of the white flower (on the left) had figured prominently in Bianca’s husband David’s quilt and became a detail in Megan’s.

Here is the final quilt, followed by some details.

I chose a pink-colored quilting thread and the same flowers and bees quilting pattern that I used for Carly’s quilt.

And now for the bees! Making the little appliqué bee in Jenna’s big sunflower quilt was so fun, I designed a whole quilt filled with them. Megan chose it as one of two additional quilts she ordered after the first six quilt tops were finished and we still had plenty of fabric left. There was just enough of the yellow blazer left over from Jenna’s quilt to form the bee stripes.

The bee bodies got appliquéd first.

Then the wings.

Then the head, legs, and antennae.

And here’s the whole hive buzzing, waiting for the big flower to arrive in the center.

And voila!

I especially loved the gray-green-yellow-white color palette of this quilt and what a sweet striped border it made.

Here is the final quilt, followed by details.

The meandering quilting pattern is reminiscent of a bee’s flight path – it felt like a fitting addition to the quilt’s theme.

I have so much gratitude for Megan and her family for engaging me in this monumental memorial quilt project in honor of Bianca. Up next is Part II of this commission: Bianca’s Quilts: Trees, Stars, and Planets.