Lost Connections

 The start of a new month and it's time for another Endeavourers  reveal and the theme for this quarter is Memories. As ever the problem is pinning down a project for the theme from the multitude of ideas floating around in my head :)

 

 During my deliberations I kept coming back to Alzheimer's devastating effect on my Dad's memory in the last couple of years of his life. Lost Connections above is my attempt at representing some of the confusion and frustration that he, and we, felt as the disease took an ever stronger grip on him.

 

 I started by creating a collage of family photos which were then printed on to fabric by Print me Pretty 

 

Then I pulled fabrics from my stash to represent the layers of confusion behind which my Dad's memories were hidden.

 

I decided to use the same technique for this quilt that I had used for my Tucked Away Treehouse for the Endeavourers Improv Challenge, so these fabrics were layered up over the background photo squares for 6 of the 9 blocks. 

Then using the techiques from Ann Small's Layered Cloth, the fabrics were stitched together and the layers then slashed. As you can see I used a mixture of parallel lines, squares and concentric circles for the stitching and slashing. 

Two of the remaining 3 blocks, my parents' wedding photo and a photo of my Mum, were backed and outline quilted.

 The final block, a photo of my Dad, was also backed and outline quilted but it was covered with two layers of organza before being edged with a zig-zag stitch. 

These three blocks portray the strongest recollections my Dad had during this time. I suspect that if he had lived longer it may not have remained the case, but throughout his illness he did not lose the knowledge of who and what my Mum was to him. 

The strength of that connection is also portrayed in the thick, multi-coloured thread joining the two photo blocks.

I used this Newspaper Yarn (from Oliver Twist) to connect the blocks vertically and when one of the lengths snapped as I was stitching I decided to leave it in place as an apt accompaniment for the fraying blocks. 

Once again this Endeavourers Challenge has been a really interesting and thought provoking project to work on. Each step of the process makes me question and ultimately justify my choices of technique and materials to best represent my chosen theme. Needless to say there are always things that I might do differently were I to repeat the project. Unusually though, this Lost Connections quilt is pretty close to the idea I had in my head at the start of the process so I can't ask for better than that! 

As always my thanks go to Catherine and Janine for hosting the Endeavourers Group and organising these challenges so well. Head on over to the Endeavourers blog to find out how my fellow Endeavourers responded to this theme.