A few months ago, I attended the bar mitzvah for a friend’s son. In the social hour leading up to the ceremony, my friend’s aunt approached me with a small zip-lock bag filled with some fabrics. The fabrics turned out to be a small collection of her deceased father’s bow ties.

She had heard about my memorial quilts and had been holding on to these keepsakes since his death some years back. She was very excited that finally they could be transformed into something special, albeit a small something special, given the sparse amount of raw material that bow ties afford. She was game for however it turned out, she said.

I asked, as I do with all of my clients, if she could give me a general sense of what kind of person her dad was. Here is what she said:

“My dad was a bow tie kind of guy. I don’t think I ever saw him in a regular neck tie, and I definitely did not see any of his friends wearing bow ties. He was a bit of an iconoclast, a thinker-out-of-the box-er.”

I also knew that he lived in Boston and loved the Red Sox – one of his bow ties even had a Boston Red Sox print on it. I set to work, carefully deconstructing the side seams of each of the 16 bow ties I had to work with in order to secure as much material as I could.

The quilt pattern, using small squares and short rectangles, was defined by the shapes of the deconstructed ties.

After careful counting and assessing how much of each shape in each fabric I had, I began sewing the pieces together.

When the entire front was pieced, it was time to think about the quilting. It didn’t need much because of the lightweight nature of the silk as well as its small size – a mere 15″x15″. So I quilted some small boxes at the intersections of the lattice.

The result was a beautifully tight-knit assemblage of Zadie’s bow tie collection.

My friend’s aunt was originally going to frame it, but once she got to hold it in her hands, she deliberated, “I may spray some of dad’s cologne on it, or use it as a challah cover, or just rub it for luck like a buddha-belly. Currently it is in the middle of the kitchen table, and I know my dad is loving it.”