On 16th March, people over 70 years old were told to stay at home for at least 12 weeks. (This was one week before the lockdown was imposed.)

My sister, Pat, is in that group and lives alone, 50 miles away from me  so I wanted to give her something to do each day which would help to keep her sane.

I came up with this—the Covid19 quilt block. 

Each block takes 10—15 minutes to make and uses only fabric which is no use for anything else. The block is foundation pieced on onto a square cut from a well worn duvet cover.

The fabric combinations were often ugly and even the thread I used for mine was scrap—oddments left on bobbins after projects were complete. My backing fabric came from a duvet cover left in my care by my daughter. In fact the only useful component was the wadding!

I mentioned my plan in a couple of Facebook groups and was pleasantly surprised to see how many people wanted to join me on the journey. People from all over the world, many of whom had not tried to make any kind of quilt before, “got stuck in” and posted pictures of their efforts as the weeks went on.  Not everyone made a quilt. Pictures soon appeared of cushions, tote bags, foot stools, aprons and even soft toys all made with scrap fabric. The idea had grown out of all proportion and we must have covered my football pitches with patchwork between us all!

I made my block a day and called Pat each evening to check her progress.

After seven weeks, I put my 49 blocks together and added a border with similarly ugly scraps

I quilted it using a representation of a cross section of the virus using my embroidery machine and added a label to tell the story. 

 

Of course, having encouraged Pat to make her blocks I had to be a good little sister and quilt hers for her!

We both continued to make blocks and two more quilts have been completed, but I don’t want to see another virus cross section for a while!

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