Sail Away with Me

Charlotte's MRI last week was bad news.  I'll spare you the details, only to say that sometimes, I'd just like to climb aboard a little sailboat and sail away from it all.  Away from the cancer, the chemotherapy, the disability, the sadness.

I made this quilt top a couple of months ago when it seemed that all we had to auction were little girl quilts.  I had been reading the Project Linus book (which has a sailboat quilt in it), and I had seen another version of a sailboat quilt here.  The wheels of inspiration started turning, I remembered that Tracy had donated this fabric to me, and all of a sudden I knew what to do with my newly-acquired cloud fabric.  Don't you just love when that happens?!

I raw-edge appliqued the sailboat onto the background fabrics.  I wish I had taken a close-up shot of the sail, because the patchwork is actually kinda cute.  It's a little Noah's Ark-ish, with some of the blocks showing a koala bear, a lion, and a toucan peeking out.  

Check out this quilting.  How cool are these waves?  I mentioned to Anne that I wanted waves in the water, and clouds in the sky and ...

... less than a week later it was done and done.  Can you believe she had never quilted those designs before? 

Earlier this week, I added my own, straight-line quilting in the white border, then gave it a yellow, satin blanket binding.  Oh, how babies love the satin edges!

And the back is this cute, multi-colored stripe.  I didn't have time to take many pictures and to do a "proper write-up," so unless one of you is crazy about this little quilt and just has to have it because it goes perfectly with the baby's nursery, then I'm taking it to the event this Saturday.  *Edit: this quilt has been claimed!

All the quilts we've done have raised money for the Brain Tumor Center at Duke.  But friends, we could always use more money.  There just aren't enough cures.  Charlotte's oncologist has admitted that he has maybe five chemotherapy drugs to give her.  Today she will start her third, because the first two have not worked.  That means that we are running out of options.  If we were keeping score, it'd be the best out of five, and so far it's looking like this: Brain tumor: 2; Chemotherapy: 0.

Quilts or no quilts, can you spare some cash for cures?  Donate here.

Here's to bluer skies, my friends.