My beautiful Nana loved all things sewing.  She loved to create things, and she inspired and encouraged me to start making quilts.  I spent hours on the phone with her asking how to make certain blocks, and how to fix mistakes I've made. She guided me with the patience of a saint, and I know that I wouldn't have the love I have for quilting without her.  
One thing about Nana though, was that she loved to plan, shop for, cut and piece a quilt, but she wasn't the best at finishing them once the tops were made.  After she passed away in 2017, we found dozens of unfinished projects. including 31 completed quilt tops just waiting to be quilted and finished. 

It was a monumental task, but I just couldn't stand the thought of these quilts being stored away in someone's attic without getting loved the way that they deserved.  So I set to work.  With every new quilt that I started I would lay it out on my sewing room floor and just sit in the middle of it getting to know it.  I studied the blocks, and tried to figure out how she put it together. I found all the little mistakes that she made, and its those mistakes that I love the most about her quilts. They give the quilt it's personality. They make the quilt more human.  Something that she always told me was that no quilt would be perfect, and the imperfections is what makes each quilt unique and handmade.

Most of them I quilted on my small, home machine, so it was a slow and cumbersome project. More than once I would curse Nana under my breath for leaving a seam unstitched, or a border crooked.  Before I even made it halfway through the never-ending stack, I was doubting that I could finish them all.  There were even a few of them I had to take fully apart, square up each block and reassemble. It was not easy sometimes and I wanted to give up so many times.

I went through all the stages of grief.  Even months after her funeral I couldn't believe she was gone, and I would catch myself reaching for my phone to ask her a question before I realized that she wouldn't answer. I felt guilty that I should have spent more time with her and I wished that I had started sewing when I was younger so I would have had more time to learn from her. I was angry that she left this massive pile of unfinished quilts and I was the only one who could finish them. Every time I finished one, I would feel the familiar tingle of depression creep over me because I was just that much closer to being finished and not having her quilts to keep me company anymore. I worked through so many feelings of loss and sadness with every stitch, and eventually, the pile started to get smaller and smaller, until at last, I was sewing the binding on the last one.

The feelings I had as I cut the last thread was a patchwork of joy and sadness.  The enormous sense of accomplishment was like nothing I had felt before. I finished them all. These were her legacy, and they were going to my family to be loved as much as she loved us. It took all of two years to finish them all, and I feel like I got a little extra time with her each time I sat down to work on one. I knew that I wouldn't get to keep them all, so I made it a point to put them on my bed and sleep under each one for a few nights as I finished them.  It was my way of getting all I could out of them before they would go to their new homes with my Dad and aunts.

Now that all the quilts have been given out to my family, I know that Nana would have been proud of me and the work I did.  I can't promise that she would have agreed with some of the decisions that I made while choosing how to finish each quilt (because, lets face it, us quilters are very picky about how our quilts are made!), but just the fact that they're finished is a big deal, and she can rest well knowing that she is keeping all of us warm.

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