I want to share with you the story of the Tie quilt that I helped orchestrate for a very special person I know from church. He served as a stake president for our church for 9 years and his term of service was up last summer. This quilt is special not only for the person who received it but also for the men represented by the ties on the quilt and the story of togetherness that the quilt created.

My dear friend Alberta from church had the idea to give a quilt to the outgoing stake president, made up of 68 ties from all the men that served with him during his 9 year tenure. These were counselors, bishops and council members, many of whom had moved out of town and had to be tracked down again. (My husband Jason’s tie is in there, too but now I can’t remember which one it is!!)

We took all the ties and formed them into a circular Dresden Plate design.
I had nearly gotten it all quilted when I decided it looked all wrong. The ties curved too much and the circle did not look like a nice flat circle – there were too many ties so it bunched up too much. I had not figured out the math ahead of time – I thought I could just sew them all together and they’d magically create a circle. The pictures in this post all show the corrected finished quilt – I was too traumatized to take any “before” pictures!

After much agonizing, I had to take it all apart and start over. This was on a Tuesday afternoon and the quilt needed to be finished for a presentation on Friday of the same week. I told Jason about the problem and he figured out the correct math for me, based on number of ties, the circumference of a circle, and the length and width of the ties. I then enlisted lots of women from my ward and they helped me for 3 days solid, nearly round the clock to finish it. We had to unpick every single tie, recut them all, resew and quilt them down. We finished it just in time and it was very well received. We even finished the binding by hand and it was nearly queen sized when done.

This quilt really helped me learn the value of advanced planning and the very true saying “measure twice, cut once!”

This project was completed last summer but it wasn’t until our church fair last week, when I was able to get the quilt and the former stake president in the room with me to take a picture.  It was the most spiritual experience I’ve ever had making a quilt!

For the community fair that my church hosted recently, several of the church members got together to make and donate quilts representing their congregations.

When the idea was first introduced to me, my immediate thought was to make a quilt of the beautiful LDS Temple here in Las Vegas, Nevada.

I gathered a few sewers together from my ward and we set to work!

After the fair, we gave the quilt to the Stake President and it is now hanging in his office.

On Fridays we usually try to reward our kids with a fun outing or some extra free time if they’ve finished their chores and homework for the week. Well, I got MY chores done early today so I got to have my friend over to play…

Tamara has been bitten by the quilting bug so I’m helping her make a quilt. She cut out and sewed this pretty green and brown quilt top over the last month or so, then came over to my house so I could help her baste it. Next, I’ll show her how to machine quilt it and then bind it.

As a true quilt-aholic, she also brought over her adorable Abby Bag that she managed to whip together in a few hours in between taking care of her husband and kids (whom I thank for allowing her to get away and hang out with me for the afternoon!) Her bag is the one one the right and mine’s the one on the left. Do we have great taste or what??